The Display Footnotes macro now only works once on a given page. Previously I was able to have footnotes displayed at the bottom of each section. I'm pretty sure this didn't happen after we upgraded to Confluence 5.6 or I would have noticed this earlier.
Asked by Howard Friedman:

Something seems to have changed recently with the Footnotes macro. In addition to the problem with sectional footnotes mentioned above (all section footnotes now get placed in the first Display Footnotes macro, no matter where it is placed on the page); it also seems that the Footnotes macro no longer accepts the $ character. That never was a problem before.


Answers:
author: Howard Friedman
body: I should also add that all our old pages (not just new pages) with more than one Display Footnotes macro on them have ALL the footnotes showing up at the first instance of the macro. This looks bizarre, so until we can roll back the macro "upgrade", I will be removing all instances of the Display Footnotes macro on pages with multiple instances, and just adding one instance back at the bottom of those pages.

Also curiously, with the new "upgraded" Display Footnotes macro, the Reset Footnote Count parameter has no effect, at least when multiple instances are included on the same page.

However, when a section with a new Display Footnotes macro is embedded in a multiexcerpt macro, the page where the multiexcerptInclude macro is set can have footnotes in different sections --- and the count on the extra Display Footnotes macro is reset whether or not the Reset Footnote Count parameter is selected.


author: Howard Friedman
body: Hi Rodrigo,

It certainly isn't resolved -- even if we do eventually roll back our Footnote macro. (Apparently we first need to uninstall the old version, restart Confluence and then install the old macro version. In the meanwhile, we're not sure yet what that is going to do with all the pages that are already using the plugin, so we are hesitating for the moment.)

In any case, there are real problems with the latest Footnote macro update. There needs to be at least an option to allow footnote displays per section (ie, multiple footnote displays per wiki page). It baffles me completely that they removed this capability. And they should also allow a $ sign character in the footnote without preventing an entire page from displaying.

Cheers,  
Howard


author: Rodrigo Girardi Adami
body: Hi Howard,

I'm not specialist in the footnotes Macro, but I suggest to upgrade the plugin to the latest version and check if the issue persists.

If yes, I suggest to get in touch with the plugin vendor Adaptavist since they might be able to help. I'll leave this question open as others might know what is going on.

Cheers,

Rodrigo

comments: author: Howard Friedman
body: Hi Rodrigo,

Thanks for your reply. Actually it was the macro upgrade that created the issue (I wasn't aware that our remote IT guy was updating this macro -- although I had requested other macro updates). Now we are looking to get an older version of the macro to roll back the "upgrade".   

It amazes me that the newer version doesn't even have an option to allow footnotes per section rather than per page. I believe that is essential for a wiki, even if it is not a typical option for printed content.   

Regards,  
Howard


author: Rodrigo Girardi Adami
body: Interesting finding Howard. Thanks for letting us know. Feel free to choose this question as resolved if my answer was satisfactory. Cheers!