Footnote contents don't always display

Periodically I've had problems with the footnote contents not appearing. For example, today I was doing scripture study and clicked on footnotes and the box appeared, but no contents appeared.

I've seen this happen from time to time in the past. Usually if I waited a minute or two the footnote would eventually appear (which was unusable). Today during my scripture study nothing appeared. I can get it working now. I guess there must have been some hiccup.

I'm not sure how the footnotes are implemented, but I've seen this kind of problem several times: the online scriptures are working fine, but the footnotes have problems.

This is happening again today on Alma 8.

I went to the previous chapter, Alma 7, and the footnotes worked. Then I went back to Alma 8 and something really strange happened: The footnotes were completely missing from that chapter now (no a, b, c, etc. indicators and no hyperlinks).

The Show/Hide Footnotes feature will show or hide footnotes (typically you'll see "Hide Footnotes" in the menu on the right side just below the search box). The "footnotes were completely missing" condition sounds just like what happens when you choose to Hide Footnotes (at which point the menu item changes to "Show Footnotes"). But it doesn't sound like you're explicitly using that feature, and what you described in your first post doesn't sound like the typical show/hide feature, but it might be related; perhaps something is amiss with javascript on your browser. You might try a different browser just to experiment.

You are correct: I am not using the show/hide footnotes feature.

I believe I've figured out the problem. I was opening Alma 8 from the online Gospel Doctrine teacher's manual. The lesson referred to Alma 8-9 using the following URL:

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/alma/8-9?lang=eng

When the URL refers to multiple chapters, the footnotes don't work properly. If I change the URL to just refer to one chapter, it works properly:

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/alma/8?lang=eng

I tried a few different URLs that refer to multiple chapters and the footnotes always fail. This seems to be a reliable scenario to reproduce. I hope with this information that the problem can be fixed. There are several ways you can encounter this problem with links on the church websites.

mevans wrote:I believe I've figured out the problem. I was opening Alma 8 from the online Gospel Doctrine teacher's manual. The lesson referred to Alma 8-9 using the following URL:

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm/alma/8-9?lang=eng

When the URL refers to multiple chapters, the footnotes don't work properly. If I change the URL to just refer to one chapter, it works properly:

Although your detective work seems to shed some light on your situation, I would note that I can go to that URL with multiple chapters and the footnotes appear just as they always do for me. I tried it in IE9, Firefox, and Safari, and they all worked perfectly with that multi-chapter URL.

One clarifying question: when the footnotes are missing, does the menu on the right include the option "Hide Footnotes" or the option "Show Footnotes"?

Yes, it it set to show footnotes. The footnotes do display; the problem is when you click on the footnote, you get an empty bubble (no contents).
This is very easy for me to reproduce. I've done it in the following browsers:

Safari (Mac)
Firefox (Mac, Win)
IE9 (Win)
Chrome (Mac, Win)

What I haven't reproduced is my comment about the footnote markings missing. I've only seen that happen once and haven't put energy into reproducing that problem. My main concern is that the contents in the footnote bubble window don't appear.

mevans wrote:Yes, it it set to show footnotes. The footnotes do display; the problem is when you click on the footnote, you get an empty bubble (no contents).

OK. I guess I was too focused on the comment you made about the footnote markers not displaying; I hadn't understood that the big issue for you was the footnote bubble not appearing.

Now that I understand that, I can see that your analysis is quite correct. Apparently the main display of a chapter of scripture is tolerant of a chapter such as "8-9" in the URL, but the popup is not tolerant of such a chapter.

Glad things are cleared up now. Hopefully that allows you to file a bug report (or whatever you do internally) on the problem.