This is an unfortunate consequence of a performance feature of markdown-it, which provides a `renderInline` function to do *almost* exactly what we want for answer summaries.

I did raise it as [an issue on GitHub](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it/issues/615) but it isn't going to change:

> References are not "inline" objects. So, works as expected.

We are left with three choices:

1. Edit answers so the first line only has inline links.

   *Downside:* we'll probably be forever editing posts just for this tweak, and it makes posts that have neat links less neat.


1. Use the full-fat renderer for generating the answer summaries.

    *Downside:* we've tried this, and apart from meaning a lot of unnecessary bandwidth downloading full answers to the client, it also appears to be hard to get right. 

1. Pre-parse reference links in markdown on the server.

    *Downside:* this will get horribly complicated and bug-prone if we try to do too much — we can probably get away with just replacing reference links.
    
We've gone for option (3) for now at least. Reference links were the last *common* oddity showing up in the answer summaries, and now they work, along with all the genuine inline markdown. Performance and bandwidth aren't affected because we generate the amended markdown one-liner when answers are posted or amended, and only send that snippet to the browser where it needs to render answer summaries.

[This fails] ₋ [This works](#) — This answer is just to demonstrate the bug.


[This fails]: #