Footnotes block encountered error; cannot recover footnotes
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I am working on a draft of a post and I have about seven footnotes in a footnotes block. While I was writing, I scrolled down and noticed that my footnotes block had been replaced by a white rectangle with the message “This block has encountered an error and cannot be previewed”.
I am unable to recover the text of the footnotes, even when I try to load previous versions. The superscript links to the footnotes still exist in the body of the text, but nothing happens if you click them.
How can I fix this issue/recover my footnotes?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Also wanted to add: In the code editor, where the footnotes should be there is only the line “<!– wp:footnotes /–>” (please let me know if I can clarify/add any information, I’m new to wordpress and this is my first time posting)
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One more thing (sorry): I’m not sure if this is related, but I seems like the changes I’m making to the post also aren’t saving. I’m ctrl+s-ing and whatnot but the status in the upper right corner remains “Saved” (usually it changes to “Autosaving…” for a few seconds before changing back, but now it’s just frozen as “Saved”). If I make new changes and then try to preview it in a new tab, my changes also don’t show up.
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Hey there @sophiayypi, I’m going to see what I can find re: footnotes and revisions. I want to say they currently won’t come up in revisions.
But they shouldn’t be breaking either. Can you share more about what happened there? Any idea what made it stop working? I tried adding links and doing some formatting to my footnotes block in a test, but couldn’t duplicate the error without completely deleting it then going back a version.At that point, I had to remove and redo the footnotes.
Re: your post not saving, could you test to see whether you’ve got the same problem in another browser?
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I have the exact same problem that sophiayppi above is describing. I wrote a post with a bunch of footnotes in July. I saw a typo yesterday and went to fix it. When I updated the post, all the footnotes were deleted. When I go to the edit mode, I also see a box at the bottom that says “Footnotes found in blocks within this document will be displayed here.” The post still has the footnote numbers but no numbers or notes at the very bottom. If I try to revert to the older version, the footnotes are broken there, too.
Post: https://katedowninglaw.com/2023/07/13/ai-licensing-cant-balance-open-with-responsible/
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I will also note that the edits I made to fix the typo were not in the footnotes and didn’t involve any words with superscript numbers attached either. The mere act of editing and republishing the fixed version seems to have caused the breaking.
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@lindenksv thank you for clarifying, that amount of detail really helps. Our devs are investigating this issue, and have not uncovered a fix yet, but one thing I would like you to try is to restore your most recent revision here: https://katedowninglaw.wordpress.com/wp-admin/revision.php?revision=526
This is the ‘wp-admin’ version of the revisions UI, so it looks a bit different from the one you may see pop up within the editor. Other site owners have reported success with restoring revisions from here specifically, and had footnotes return as a result.
Are you able to confirm if this has worked for you? Thanks for your help!
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@supernovia Sorry about the late reply! I’m honestly not sure what caused it to break. My footnotes were working fine for the most part. I was just typing more content as usual in the body of the post and scrolled down to check on my footnotes when I saw that they were gone. I wasn’t using any fancy custom templates or external plug-ins. I also tried to change my post in Microsoft Edge, and I still wasn’t able to save my changes, so it seems like it isn’t an issue with the browser.
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Hi @sophiayypi, looks like you have the same issue as @lindenksv. Can you please check if you can restore your footnotes by editing your post through the wp-admin dashboard? Here’s a direct link to the revisions page: https://metotheipi.wordpress.com/wp-admin/revision.php?revision=113
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@fstat Thanks for the link – I did find my footnotes in a previous version! It still wasn’t showing up in the more recent versions, so I just ended up duplicating my post to preserve the body of the post and copy/pasting the text of the footnotes over to the copy. This also seemed to resolve my saving issue. Thank you so much!
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@staff-totoro I don’t think that did anything for me. None of the revisions brought back the footnotes
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Hey there @lindenksv,
It looks like the footnotes are available here: https://katedowninglaw.wordpress.com/wp-admin/revision.php?revision=530 – does this look accurate?
Many thanks in advance!
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