EA Forum: Footnotes are live, and other updates

By Aaron Gertler 🔸 @ 2019-05-21T00:26 (+32)

The team behind the EA Forum would like to share the following updates:

Updates to post categorization guide

We recently made some updates to our post on the distinction between content in the “Frontpage”, “Community”, and “Personal Blog” categories. We recommend reading the post if you haven’t done so before and use the Forum often.

Footnotes are live

Update (2/8/21): We now recommend using this Google Docs add-on to create posts in Markdown. The add-on perfectly converts all the footnotes in a Google Doc, so that you don't need to worry about the below advice. But we're keeping the advice there for folks who don't use Google Docs, don't want to use the add-on, want to make manual fixes, etc.

You can now add linked footnotes to your posts!

To do this, you'll need to use the Markdown editor; you can switch between editors using the "Activate Markdown Editor" setting within "Edit Profile".

Here’s the Markdown formatting you’ll need. You can read the official guide here.

This sentence has an inline footnote, which is probably the easiest kind to use while writing. ^[Here’s the note, which will appear at the bottom of the post once it’s published.]

To show off the other option, which lets you add more than one paragraph of text, I’m adding a non-inline footnote to the next sentence. I can use any text after a caret inside brackets, as long as I use the matching symbol in the note below. [^fn-1]

[^fn-1]: Here’s a long footnote with multiple blocks.

Here’s the second block of the long footnote, indented to show that it still belongs to the previous footnote. This requires adding four spaces in front of the text after moving to a new line. (I haven't done that here, because it would turn the line into a code block outside the context of a footnote.)

Footnote syntax may take some getting used to, so we encourage you to try it out in a draft before you publish your first footnoted post.

Bios are now more visible

You can now see a user’s bio, if they’ve written one, by hovering over their username. This makes bios more useful than ever — if you haven’t written one, consider doing so!

Feedback

We’d love to hear your thoughts on any of these changes and updates. As always, you can leave a comment here or email the Forum team.