How to make footnotes in posts

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1

I’ve noticed a lot of people trying to make footnotes with asterisks recently. That doesn’t work well because an asterisk at the start of a line in Markdown starts a bullet list. But it turns out there’s a footnote option, too! Discourse automatically numbers and links all the footnotes.

  • To create a footnote reference, type [^1][1] anywhere in the text.

  • To create the actual footnote, start a line with [^1]: and then type your footnote. The line can appear anywhere in text of the post, but the formatted footnote will always appear at the bottom. Because of the whole “foot” part.

  • For multiple footnotes, just change the reference number.

For a real-world example, I tweaked @Simon’s recent post.

Give it a try the next time you want to use an asterisk to denote a footnote!

  1. In fact, you can use any unique character in place of the 1, even an asterisk, but it must match its note, and each one will still be numbered sequentially. ↩︎

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3

Now how do you do bold* text?

* Here’s a footnote without a number

4

Bold text is two asterisks before and after the text. (Basically markdown formatting.)

So **this** yields this.

5

No argument from me about using footnotes, but note it is possible to start a line with an asterisk and not have it turned into a bullet. You need to put a backslash in front of the asterisk to escape it. So:

\* this

produces:

* this

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6

You didn’t format an actual footnote. You just started a line with a star. But when I quoted it, the preceding backslash (how I assume you created it) didn’t get quoted and your “footnote” became a bullet.

(I manually added a backslash in my quote of your post.)

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