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MathJax in profiles displays differently depending on community
Some communities have MathJax enabled, which allows including mathematical notation in posts. I wondered whether this would extend to the user profile, so I did a test.
I edited my profile to include the following:
Testing MathJax in a profile:
$1+1$
The preview showed mathematical notation on a site that has MathJax enabled (in this case, Code Golf), and showed the raw text on a site that does not have MathJax enabled (here on Codidact Meta).
Similarly after saving, the profile shows as raw text unless the profile is reached from a community that has MathJax enabled, in which case it renders as mathematical notation.
This means someone in one of the mathematics related communities could edit their profile to add some MathJax, and not realise that people viewing their profile in other communities will not see the rendered result.
What should the behaviour be?
I'm not sure if this counts as a bug or a feature request, or if it even needs to change, so I'm tagging it discussion. Should a user be warned that the MathJax will look different when viewed from other communities? Should MathJax be disabled for profiles regardless of community? Should MathJax be enabled for profiles even on communities where it is disabled for posts?
1 answer
I'm not sure there's a lot we can do about this, other than potentially adding a warning if MathJax is enabled. It's hard to reliably detect MathJax in a post, and even harder to reliably remove it - so disabling or content-triggered warnings aren't realistically doable.
We could add a simple warning above the profile field on all communities where MathJax is enabled to say that if you use MathJax it will not render on other communities.
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