Footnote duplicated in the widget

Hello @inoruhana,

Thank you for reporting this bug. Trying to reproduce it, I’ve installed and activated the SEO plugin you are using. Then it started happening.

Without the SEO plugin:

https://ibb.co/ckQ3Cwp

With the SEO plugin:

https://ibb.co/0pLypDq

We’re sorry that it isn’t fixed yet.

Best regards.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by pewgeuges.

Hello @inoruhana,

The bug has been found and is being fixed in upcoming v2.5.7 that is now fast-tracked and shall be released ASAP. It involves also adding a new setting.

I wasn’t aware that under certain circumstances, footnotes are duplicated because the search is run twice, once with escaped HTML characters, once with unescaped HTML characters in the footnote delimiter shortcodes, relying on the assumption that the second search would be unsuccessful if the first one is successful, or whatever. That may induce a non-trivial process garbage, is making the plugin unstable — see this issue — and is outdated since the introduction of the new Block Editor that applies asymmetric pointy bracket escapement, as opposed to the Classic editor. So the use of delimiter shortcodes containing < and > requires the ability to choose which escapement mode is applied, if any.

Most importantly, and no matter if pointy brackets are involved or not, the plugin will now stop searching footnotes twice, as that seems to fix this issue.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by pewgeuges.

@inoruhana

It’s now really fixed. It was less of a plugin conflict than of a hidden bug in the process, because fixing it only took emptying the footnotes list every time the content is searched for footnotes.

So, as stated in the new docblock, under certain circumstances, footnotes were duplicated, because the footnotes list was not emptied each time before the search algorithm is run. That happened e.g. when both the reference container resides in the widget area, and the YOAST SEO plugin is active and calls the hook the_content to generate the Open Graph description, while Footnotes is set to avoid missing out on the footnotes (in the content) by hooking in as soon as the_content is called, whereas at post end Footnotes seems to hook in the_content only the time it’s the blog engine processing the post for display and appending the refs.

Indeed, as seen at the beginning, the first two footnotes are in the Open Graph description when they are near the post start; but no matter where, they’re counted because Yoast SEO calls the whole content, and Footnotes is set to hook in and grasp the footnotes. Yet the only time the list was emptied was after filtering the supported content.

Hope that makes some sense. Whatever, the bug is now fixed, and v2.5.7 is being released.

Thank you very much for discovering this bug and for bringing it up!
Thanks for helping improve the Footnotes plugin!

@inoruhana,

Thanks for your feedback and blessing!