tea.mathoverflow.net - Category Feed (Feature requests)

Link rot on tea

Asaf Karagila — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:45:42 -0700

It just occurred to me that there is a huge link rot on tea.MO.

More specifically, every previously linked meta discussion has an invalid link. Is there an option to search and replace all the references to meta.MO by tea.MO?

Where to keep track of MathOverflow success stories

Noah Snyder — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:30:28 -0800

We should have a central repository somewhere with links to papers that had a significant mathoverflow component. This will be useful when someone needs to apply for a grant to pay for Math Overflow (or when Ravi renews his grant).

MathJax 2.2

Scott Morrison — Sun, 05 May 2013 18:02:30 -0700

MathJax 2.2 beta is now out http://www.mathjax.org/mathjax-v2-2-beta-now-available/, with the final release in a few weeks. Notably, it includes support for AMS commutative diagrams http://ctan.unsw.edu.au/macros/latex/required/amslatex/math/amscd.pdf.

Our current MathJax setup doesn't automatically upgrade to new versions (and is still back at 2.0). Two questions:

Should I change the MathJax setup to automatically use the latest stable version?
Should we use the "bleeding edge" MathJax 2.2 beta right now?

It seems we are a pretty good candidate site for trying out their beta for them --- we have lots of eyes, people care about the typesetting looking right, and there's a reasonable chance that if problems are noticed feedback would at least reach meta. On the other hand maybe it's not worth the bother, or on the whole we'd prefer the safety of a stable version.

"Closing questions is rude", from "How do I see LaTeX math on any web page?"

Scott Morrison — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:51:27 -0700

I've started this thread as the comments on http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22141/how-do-i-see-latex-math-on-any-web-page threaten to degenerate into a fight between me and VA.

Several points:

1) I said that referring to a previous question (c.f. http://mathoverflow.net/questions/19679/seeing-math-when-viewing-abstracts-on-arxiv-org-closed) as "closed by the MO thought police" was rude. I stand by this. Calling someone "thought police" clearly denigrates them. Obviously, one is allowed to identify real "thought police" when they appear, but I think you're clearly against the consensus here: the people who closed the previous question left well thought out explanations of why they closed the question.

2) Closing a question is not rude, and I think it's important for everyone to internalise this. It is not an insult, it is not a personal rejection. It's a community process that decides that a question is not appropriate on MathOverflow. (In this particular case, commenters made it clear that it would be much more appropriate on StackOverflow.) We're trying very hard to keep MathOverflow focused and on topic. There is easily sufficient community support for the current approach that we're taking to keeping MathOverflow on topic --- this isn't something to argue about at this point (or at least, not in the context of any specific question or vote to close), just something to accept about what MathOverflow is.

3) The MathOverflow community has a quite strong objection to duplicate questions. Your question is clearly a duplicate! I'm actually a little surprised people didn't step in more quickly with votes to close on this basis. Allowing duplicate questions is a real pain --- if a question gets closed, the appropriate thing to do is either revise the question and hope that it is reopened (this has happened many times), and to come over the meta.MO and discuss the reasons for closure. We've had several instances in the past where someone has felt strongly about a closed question, and after some discussion here and some revisions, the question has been reopened. I think anyone with a closed question may find themselves suprised by how willing people are to reopen, once some regard is given to the original complaints against the question. It is inappropriate to ignore the existing consensus on a question, and repost it --- it's immensely frustrating to anyone who went to the effort of explaining why the original question should be closed.

Now -- VA, if you're reading this: these points all apply in particular to your recent questions! I understand that you vigorously disagree with the closure of your original question. Nevertheless, simply reposting the question is not the right way to proceed. You have to show some willingness to engage with the objections to your previous question!

I'm sorry if I upset you, because I don't intend to. Hopefully you can see that I think it's an interesting question (indeed, from my answer you can see that I spent some time trying to work at an answer to it)! Nevertheless, the community process is important here, and it's important to both respect that, and not insult people who were acting in good faith.

Is there any API that I can use to fetch the data in real time from MathOverflow?

Vincent CHEN — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:05:28 -0700

I have been thinking about making an iOS/Android app for MathOverflow for some while. I hope to implement features like:
1. Basic browsing/posting/answering questions.
2. LaTex support.
3. Follow specific user/topic/tag, and get notification about any update.

These features only make sense when I'm able to get the real time data.

However after I did some searches, I sadly found MathOverflow doesn't support StackExchange API.
I do find there is a database dump: http://dumps.mathoverflow.net/. Unfortunately it is not in real time...

So is there any way that I can fetch the real time data from MathOverflow?
I would appreciate any words on this matter. :)

being able to follow someone's answers on MO

leyenson — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:12:31 -0700

I like NN's questions and answers.

I would like to be able to follow his questions and answers [on the MathOverflow web site, without using external RSS reader.]

(In other words, I am able to follow/star specific questions. I would also like to be able to follow/star specific people.)

Thank you.

downvote without reason is not constructive

chiapas — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 01:36:29 -0700

I don't think force the users to give reasons why they downvote an answer, a question or a comment is a good decision. But I feel that downvote without reason is not constructive. Is there anyway to encourage users to give reasons?

The Sage Cell server on Mathoverflow

isasdoes — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 06:00:39 -0700

The Sage Cell Server enables embedding of live Sage computations directly into any web page. These computations can easily include 2d and 3d plots, sliders, buttons, etc
http://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/amsmtgs/2141_abstracts/1086-00-2238.pdf

Would it be a good idea to have the Sage Cell Server on Mathoverflow?

Could this be installled on Mathoverflow with some javascript or would it require Stackexhange to modify their software?

What existing questions would have benefited from including a live computation widget?

What sort of questions in general would this be good for?

Would it be used often?

LaTeX reCaptcha for new users?

hyh1048576 — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:24:54 -0800

I just thought about the following idea: maybe Mathoverflow can get some LaTeX reCAPTCHA for new users.

For those who don't know, reCAPTCHA does two things at the same time:
keep bots (and thus spams) away, and digitalizing documents.
They do it by asking user to recognize and input words from scanned documents.

I remember being asked by MO "Are you a human" at some point,
so why not take this chance to digitalize some math books?

There are tons of Lecture Notes in Mathematics by Springer from the pre-LaTeX era,
and as many of them are still valuable, it will be a good idea to TeXify them.
However, TeXify books can be boring and time-consuming.

How about we choose a short LNM book, and ask a new user to TeXify a line whenever they ask a question.
(As long as they got 30 reputation -- that's three upvotes, they won't be annoyed again.)

Of course, this could be fairly technical to implement,
and the quality of the TeXified is not guaranteed, but I think it is an interesting idea.

And Hopefully it can keep high school homework questions
("How do I prove this trigonometric identity?" with tag "ag.Algebraic Geometry") away.

Checklist when posting for the first time or if not enough rep. points

Yuichiro Fujiwara — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:02:49 -0800

I've seen some (but of course not all) questions treated in a bit unfriendly manner such as a terse reply along the line of "Read FAQ." Even well-meant answers can be downvoted presumably because answering to the wrong kind of question can be detrimental to MO. While I understand why some people behave this way (I agree that off-topic questions shouldn't be encouraged), I don't think it's the most friendly way to treat others asking for help or people who came here to enjoy math, albeit they may not have asked their questions in exactly the right place.

So, I'm wondering if mods can make a change to MO to reduce the number of off-topic questions and the like. For example, is it possible to code MO so that a checklist of some sort pops up when a new member (or member with reputation points fewer than a certain threshold) hits the "Ask My Own Answer" button? I'm thinking of something like checkboxes with questions asking if your question is of research level, if you've done your homework before asking, if you understand this is not the place for homework for your math course, etc. So, basically you should tick all the checkboxes before you can start a new thread if it's your first time (or if you haven't earned enough reputation points). The checklist may contain a link to math.stackexchange.com possibly with a word in a friendly tone explaining how the linked website may be better suited.

The FAQ of MO says we should think of this place as a large seminar and act accordingly. Personally I wouldn't feel very comfortable if someone kicks out a person from a conversation with one terse reply of "Thou shall not ask that here" just because it was too naive or too elementary. I think it's perfectly ok to give hints or quick answers to off-topic questions (if OP is also informed that the question was not appropriate and told where their question might belong better, of course) when the rules are buried under a long FAQ section in a not-easy-to-find page. Your average person wouldn't read FAQ anyway. Of course, we should fend off a flood of off-topic questions in some way. But I don't think it's extremely realistic to expect everyone carefully reads the FAQ before posting. Repeating "Read FAQ" again and again doesn't help either because most likely a newbie has never heard your words unless they've been a longtime lurker here. So, as a compromise, if we shouldn't help others who asked questions that aren't the most appropriate for MO, it kind of made sense to me to "force" each and every new member to read at least the most important part of FAQ when starting a new thread for the first time or until they earn enough reputation points. I have no idea if this kind of feature is even technically possible, but I tend to think it'd be nice if we could be a little bit less dismissive or make the fine print more visible, or both...

I'm sorry if I came out sounding like a moral preacher. I definitely didn't mean that way. It's just I thought there might be a better solution than telling others to read the FAQ ad infinitum and punishing well-meant answers.

May be put reputation> 100 barrier to add answer for question which already has more than 10 ans ?

Alexander Chervov — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 12:18:35 -0700

May be put reputation > 100 barrier to adding answer for question which already has more than 10 answer ?

It happens may be not often, but sometimes happens that newcomers add somewhat irrelevant answers
to vague questions. Like today it was added "on youtube there are lots of math fun..." (or similar)
answer to http://mathoverflow.net/questions/1714/best-online-mathematics-videos
and another irrelevant to http://mathoverflow.net/questions/23525/how-does-an-academic-mathematician-educate-him-herself-about-job-opportunities-ou
(both deleted now).

Vague question like this are known to attract such kind of newcomers, and that is why
there are sometimes closed, which is too strong action imho.

auto-completion for tags in search box

Dror Speiser — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:13:31 -0700

Hello,

Sure would be awesome if there will be auto-completion for tags in the search box, like in questions.
Of course it should only load after a [ is punched in.

Any thoughts?

Dror

Why cannot I see how many consecutive days I have been logged in?

Zeeshan Mahmud — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 20:17:39 -0700

Is the feature disabled for this site unlike SE?

Interests tracking

djordan — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:44:26 -0700

At first when I began using MO, I didn't mind the diversity of topics listed on the homepage, but as it has garnered more and more users, of diverse backgrounds, interests, and abilities, I find myself (a) less interested in questions presented to me when I log in, (b) less able to elicit answers from knowledgeable people in my field (which I think is just a reflection of their own frustrations with (a)), and (c) less inclined to want to do much about it. I am afraid that the sprawling, accept-all-comers, diverse nature of the site has led it to be too vast a forum for me to function with efficiently. Wasting time is all well and good, but everyone's patience has its limits.

There are tags, which one can use to filter out unwanted entries and also to highlight one's interests. I have selected several in both categories, but again due to the sprawling nature of the site, managing these continually is more hassle than I'm willing to undertake. There are duplicates, or closely related tags, and there are new tags coming up often. If I feel like the utility of the site is diminishing, I am less likely to invest time sculpting my experience by fussing over tags, which don't seem to help much anyways.

So here's a simple feature request (simple to request, not so to implement =]). Have the stack exchange software track which questions I view, which questions I answer, and which questions I ask, as well as an weighted undirected graph connecting tags which appear in the same question with the multiplicity of their common appearance. When I log in, order questions not only by chronological statistics, such as recent activity, but also based on my perceived interests, as measured by the correlation of my interaction with the website to the aforementioned graph (I could be more specific here, but there are many intriguing ways to do this).

There are some downsides to such a proposal, so I suppose it should be an option users can turn on and off. But I fear as it is, MO has jumped the shark for most selective, research-oriented askers and answerers. Without a way of automatically tailoring content, the site is just going to get unusable.

I'm sure the site's creators know that I think it's an excellent enterprise, and a service. I only offer this functionality request because I think it will help make the site useful for everyone.

Editing Comments

chandrasekhar — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:31:54 -0700

I am a user of the Math.SE and Mathoverflow. In MATH.SE I see that I am allowed to edit comments, but here in MathOverflow, suppose you have a spelling mistake and enter the comment, then you have to retype it again. Wouldn't it be a good idea to allow user to edit their comments within a duration of 5 minutes or so?

Title of question misses left CSS margin?

joro — Sun, 27 May 2012 22:58:34 -0700

In all questions the title starts exactly from the left window border (when not in full screen mode).

Suppose this is a suboptimal typography practice.

Probably it can be easily fixed by adding CSS like:

margin-left: $X$em

or something similar.

Making the link to markdown syntax page more accessible?

jc — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:35:45 -0700

Forgive me if there's already been a discussion on this, I searched "markdown" and got an absurd number of topics.

I keep looking for the nice "markdown" syntax page when I'm typing an answer and I can't find it easily in the FAQ, or on the sidebar. I realize it is linked to on the "how to ask" page (which is how I eventually keep finding it), [and now that I'm testing out editing, I realize that the big blue question mark on the formatting bar also goes that page... so I feel pretty silly now] but I think it would be helpful if it were linked to on the sidebar, or perhaps if there was a text label on the formatting bar too.

The sidebar on the page for asking questions does have a helpful list of commands and a link, so perhaps that should be copied onto the answer page so that it is visible when writing an answer.

The flipside of this is that perhaps the interface will be slightly more cluttered, but that seems like a minor price to pay for better-formatted questions and answers.

Can I stop my question to be pop-uping without accepting answer ?

Alexander Chervov — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:17:07 -0800

My question
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/79290/how-to-do-mgram-schmidt-orthogonalization-with-integers-real-life-problem

is pop-uping by Mathoverflow quite often (by the way what is criteria for pop-up ?).

I do not think it is that much interesting question to be so much pop-uped.
On the other hand there is no answer which is satisfactory for me, but I am afraid may be it is a little chance to get it (in part may be
question is not so good).

So I would prefer this question not to be pop-uped, but without accepting answer.

--

There is simple way I can do by myself - just write something like that in the answer and accept it, but may be there is more canonical way ?

Is there any hope for an MO smartphone app?

bsteinberg — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:06:54 -0800

I normally use MO on my smart phone while commuting. Is there any hope of a mobile version of the site?

Conversion of famous MO posts into PDF files

trustgod — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:35:13 -0800

I had this flash in my mind while I was asking a question in Math.SE, I thought that some of the answers posted by the users especially the answers posted by Prof.Matthew Emerton and Prof.Pete.L.Clark, Prof.David Speyer, Prof.Kevin Buzzard, Prof.Mark sapir, Prof.Todd Trimble and many more to name.. are so influential and magnificent that they helped thousands of students and served as a light-houses for those who look for an intuition into a complex topic, so there is a dire need to turn them as nice expository papers for the sake of students ( which I explain later ) .

So I was intending to ask the question on MO instead of Math.SE as "J.M." has already posted a reference to the same issue I asked, which was previously asked by some other OP ( which is just similar to it, but not exact ), but I didn't have any intention to make the Meta redundant by posting the same question, so I would like to share my views and ideas, users and other persons kindly respond.

My main intention was to collect a set of interested people who are experts in LaTeX, and do like this :

1)First the people ( People here refers to the ones who come out voluntarily, they should have knowledge in judging the quality of answers, I mean a good-mathematical background ( not like my background ) ) should assemble at a Meta thread and start collecting fantastic answers of questions posted, and keep a voting system impartially . The answer that has got the highest votes must be selected

2) Then a PDF file must be prepared with a reference to the MO Question ( which will not only contribute for implanting knowledge but also serve as a means of advertising MO, as everyone who reads those articles surely know about MO then ! ) and that file should be kept in their respective home-pages.

3) The most important or major doubts that one encounter can be grouped together under the PDF file with name "FAQ of Number-Theory " and we can use as a reference at last of the respective subject articles, ( like the end of the Number theory book/Number theory lecture article /Abstract Algebra book or any other book, so that people who read the PDF lecture file reads the FAQ of the subject at last and understands the major concepts and doubts and as answers are also present at the next to them it would be so handy to use ) .

J.M. has already pointed to something called "Stack Printer" which is this one ( http://www.stackprinter.com/ ) , It doesn't serve the complete purpose, It just gives the scope for printing , but I always think that a PDF file would be much useful to keep, as we can read it offline too, and also we can't print all articles .

So I am ready to extend any sort help but I didn't take initiative as I neither don't have a Web-page nor a online space, and I know that if I take initiative I am sure to face comment-wars which I don't want to happen, so I stopped as I know a proverb that "Blind man should never lead people" ( Not that I am blind literally )

So if you think its good I have still plans with me, but I am surely desiring to see those magnificent answers turn into well-formatted TeX

P.S: if you think that its a long process, the best thing one can do is to add a new interactive feature to that "Stack Printer" asking a user to choose the options, and options will be "Download as PDF, Print Document etc.. "

Thanks a lot.
yours truly,
Iyengar

Delay before deleting

Mariano — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:01:23 -0800

I know we can't change the software... but if someday we can, we should be able to delete some questions faster! Closing http://mathoverflow.net/questions/81609/ was not strong enough :/

search for most viewed/most responded to/most rep points threads

sAAvior — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 04:37:59 -0800

Hi,

I lurk MO a lot. I enjoy reading threads which generate a lot of discussion. It would be cool if I it was possible to search for threads which generated a lot of views/responses/reputation points in the past. I can imagine there were hundreds of interesting threads like that which are now very difficult to find.
Is there any way this could be done ?

Being able to vote "not close"

Jacques Carette — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:20:06 -0800

I really think it should be possible for people to vote not to close a function, not just unilateral 'close'. It only takes 5 votes to close a question, and then it is a more painful process to get it re-opened. If people could vote either way, this process could be simplified.

If 5 more people think that the question should be closed than people think it should remain open, I think that that is indeed enough to close it. But right now, any 5 people can 'unilateraly' close a question, and it takes effort to re-open. This seems unbalanced.

Is an alternative to Gravatar possible?

Dmitri Pavlov — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 05:48:55 -0700

Currently MathOverflow uses Gravatar, a commercial service, for its avatars.
I see at least two problems with this.

1) User's email address is disclosed.
Even though Gravatar uses md5 hashes instead of the actual email addresses,
this does not protect them well because there is only a limited number of email user names and domains.
http://www.developer.it/post/gravatars-why-publishing-your-email-s-hash-is-not-a-good-idea
This means that eventually spambots will harvest md5 hashes from gravatar
and recover email addresses from them.
Perhaps somebody already did that.

What I find particularly disturbing is that there is no way to opt out of this,
unless one is willing to delete one's email address from the profile,
which is not a very good idea because MO moderators need email addresses to communicate with users privately.

We have a similar problem with disclosing IP addresses, which are used to generate identicons.
In this case the problem is much more severe, because there are only 2^32 ip addresses,
and one can easily cycle through all of them and determine the exact ip address of a supposedly
anonymous user.

2) Gravatar's terms of service are also very disturbing (I emphasize the most problematic parts):

More specifically, you hereby do and shall grant to Automattic a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to **sublicense**) right to perform the Services (e.g., to use, **modify**, reproduce, distribute, **prepare derivative works of**, display, perform, and otherwise fully exercise and exploit all intellectual property, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any User Submissions, and to allow others to do so).

I would be fine with distributing my avatars using
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license,
but Gravatar simply asks too much.

This serves as a motivation for the following two questions:
1) Can we allow users to opt out from disclosing their email addresses to Gravatar,
while still allowing moderators to communicate with them?
2) Can we allow users to host their avatars on other sites?
This can be implemented by adding an additional field (a link to the avatar) to the user's profile.

DOI feature

Asaf Karagila — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:25:37 -0700

I have a feature request which I was going to ask for in meta.math.SE as well, but figured this place would benefit from it too, while the SO developers will be less inclined to implement it (I'd think that it is lower in the priority order)

Much like the "cite" export function, it could be nice if there was an "import" function in which we can specify a DOI and the object will be instead given a nice citation form?

Since DOIs are pretty static, this can be an external (or not) script to the SE program which will hardcode the resolved data into the post instead of leaving a DOI tag to be resolved every time the post is loaded.

How does that sound?

Mathematical Captcha

federico poloni — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:16:59 -0700

I am starting to think that in order to prevent completely inappropriate questions from non-mathematicians (there's a *lot* of them) it would be useful to have a "math-oriented captcha" at the first login, in the spirit of http://random.irb.hr/signup.php (try reloading the page several times; 1/3 of the captchas are "derive... and evaluate it at...", and 1/3 are "find the least real zero of the polynomial...").

1) has this already been discussed before? A quick meta search returned nothing.
2) is this possible at all within the Stack Exchange engine? Since the site relies on OpenID rather than a real registration, I am not sure that this is possible at all.
3) do you find it a reasonable idea?

"align"

Michael Hardy — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:02:12 -0700

"align" works on stackexchange but not on mathoverflow.

I have in minde code like the following:

\begin{align}
2 + 3 & = 5 \\
2 \times 3 & = 6
\end{align}

If stackexchange can do it, it should be possible to get the same feature here.

Editing comments

Alberto GarciaRaboso — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:02:05 -0800

Today I made a comment, only to realize seconds later that there was a typo. Since I could not find a button to edit the comment, I just erased it and made a new comment with the mistake corrected. Is there another way?

Notification of comments (not just answers) prompted by questions

John Bentin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:10:56 -0700

MathOverflow will, on request, email questioners when a new answer for their question has been posted. This is a useful feature, especially when the question has gone cold. But some respondents (perhaps sometimes out of modesty) post their response as a comment, rather than an answer, even though it may have content of value and interest to the questioner. Thus, could questioners be enabled to request an email notification when a new comment---not just an answer--- has been posted among the responses to their question?

Reputation-requirement for bounty in FAQ

t-laarhoven — Thu, 12 May 2011 07:17:02 -0700

This is not really a feature-request, but it would be nice if someone could add the requirement of having at least 100 rep to the MathOverflow FAQ. Neither in the "What if I don't get a good answer?" nor in the "What is reputation?"-list is it mentioned that you need at least 100 reputation to add a bounty to a question.

So for clarity it would be good to add "100 - Add a bounty to your question" to the reputation-list, and to also add the 100 rep requirement to the section describing bounties.

Also, with 91 rep and a question in the air for 2 days, I got the red text "Have you considered accepting an answer or starting a bounty for this question?" even though I could not add a bounty. So I spent quite some time searching why I could not add a bounty or if I was just too stupid to find the right button. The red text also doesn't make sense if I cannot even add a bounty...

LaTeX in titles

John Bentin — Fri, 06 May 2011 06:12:28 -0700

In the titles for Math.StackExchange, LaTeX renders correctly. It would be nice to have this feature on MathOverflow too. Better still would be if the preview facility extended to titles and comments as well.

Drafts

davidac897 — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 06:34:27 -0800

I often write up questions for MO and then decide I want to come back to them a bit later to finish them. I always have to save a file on my computer with those questions, but it would be great if I could just click something like "save as draft" on MO.

Maybe there should be a limit on the number of questions each person can have in drafts (5?), just so it doesn't take up too much space.

I would imagine this isn't too hard to program.

Could we have a check box for non-perking "minor" edits?

Jon Awbrey — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:54:46 -0800

Is there any easy way to set-up a "minor edit" check box so that all of us more error-prone but still OCD types can correct our many typos and other stylistic infelicities without the edit percolating to the top of the leader board?

Add Favorite Questions

porton — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:26:56 -0800

Please add the feature to mark a question as favorite and every user to see the list of his favorite questions. (Other users should not see a user's list of featured questions.)

This is useful for a user to keep the list of questions he is interested in.

It is just like favorite threads in Google groups.

Self Downvoting

Bill Johnson — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:33:05 -0800

For good reasons you cannot upvote your own answers, but why not allow self downvoting?

I have made some not very well thought out answers that attracted upvotes. When I do so, I could delete the answer, but there can be reasons not to, and I would like to be able to downvote it.

Latex Search Engine for MO?

E.S — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:36:06 -0800

I recently heard that there are Latex-search enabled paper archives. MO being a very Latex-laden site, I think this feature should be integrated on MO so that searches become more targeted and mathematical. Most of our language being formulas, it at least makes sense to have it. For instance, if I wanted to find a question that contains $C\cong K^b(B)$ , it is clear that I am in the middle of nowhere!

"Back to Discussion" and "Top of the Page" links on Meta

WillieWong — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:18:57 -0800

This is a (minor) feature request for Meta.MO.

For open discussions, at the bottom of the page showing the thread there is a text box for adding new comments and two links: one to go "Back to Discussions" and one to go to the "Top of the Page".

For closed discussions, obviously there shouldn't be a text box for adding new comments. But can we still have those two rather convenient links?

Timeline for favorites

Hans Stricker — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:00:18 -0800

I am sure it's just one of many desirable features, but a "favorites timeline" would be fine: when did I add which favorite?

Feature-requests/bug-reports you should vote up on meta.S[OE]

Anton Geraschenko — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:40:42 -0700

There are a number of bugs we'd like to have fixed in Math Overflow, and a number of features we'd like implemented, but we only actually have control over the cosmetic aspects of the site. If a real feature is going to be implemented, it has to be done either by the Stack Exchange team or the Stack Overflow team. So I propose we have a central place where we collect the feature requests and bug reports on meta.stackoverflow and meta.stackexchange that are important to Math Overflow. If you have an account at meta.SE of meta.SO, please vote up the ones you think are important.

On meta.SE:

Advanced search options. SE sites don't currently have advanced search options, which allow you to search for posts by a particular user, containing a particular phrase, with a certain number of votes/views/answers, etc. The S[OFU] sites have advanced search features, so this shouldn't be very hard for the SE team to implement.
Option to undo CW mode.
Erroneous "you can only comment every 30 seconds".
Preview for comments.
Support for mathematical markup (LaTeX). We now have jsMath, but ideally, converting mathematical markup to math should happen before Markdown processing, so we don't get weird bugs from the interaction of Markdown and mathematical markup.
Markdown preview doesn't agree with final output. This has become a much bigger issue since we implemented jsMath. It's been fixed in S[OFU], so it's just a matter of time before those changes are merged into SE.

On meta.SO:

RSS feed for favorite questions.
Apply rep cap only to reputation from votes. This will become important soon enough.
Allow comments to be edited. This has been implemented on S[OFU], so it's just a matter of time.

If you find another bug/feature-request on meta.SE or meta.SO that you think is relevant to Math Overflow, please post it here.

Expanded list of reasons for closing

Timothy Chow — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 10:48:35 -0800

Somehow I feel that this issue has come up already, but I was unable to locate an existing discussion that covers it.

When I vote to close a question, I'm presented with a list of reasons for closing. This list seems inadequate. In particular, there isn't anything like "too elementary" or "homework" (unless you count "off topic," which I don't think is quite right).

Do others feel that the list of reasons is inadequate? Does the software allow this list to be expanded? If so, then what additional reasons should be added to the list?

Any way to "copy source" all at once in a comment containing LaTeX

Harry Gindi — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:42:16 -0800

Given how wily our administrators here are, I figured I'd ask if this could be done:

Right now, if you write a comment containing LaTeX, and there is an error, you have to retype all of the LaTeX stuff. What would be nice is if there were a way to either "view source" for the entire comment at once or somehow copy the source to the clipboard.

No problems if you can't figure out how to do it using methods available to you. I just figured I'd give you the challenge and see how things work out!

sick of typing mathbf/mathbb

Kevin Buzzard — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:13:26 -0800

Because of my interests, most of my answers/comments at MO seem to talk about things like \mathbf{Z}_p or \mathbf{Z}/p\mathbf{Z}. Is there any way of making it so I can just type \Z_p or \Z/p\Z like I do in all my LaTeX files? Z/pZ is particularly annoying :-) I would happily have some macro at my end, or perhaps, if possible, one might consider globally defining \Z, \Q, \R, \C to be the things that most people use them to mean, if this is possible. Is it?

Could a few Moderators please remove one of my questions?

maxmuller100 — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:19:48 -0800

There's one question in which I ask what the value of some strange infinite sumseries is. I do not know how to express the general term of the series, which is why the question looks a bit strange and chaotic... I'm no longer very interested in its answer, since I learned that the infinite product of $(1-\frac{x^2}{n^2 \cdot pi^2}$ can not be split up into two other infinite products I've mentioned in an other question.

The question about the infite series keeps popping up and people try to answer it while it's not very clear what the question is, which leads to more comments and wrong answers. These people have essentially put effort in answering a question that is not of great interest to me anymore. If some of you still want to keep the question open because you think it is interesting or at least want to be able to go to from the homepage, then it's all right with me. In that case, the question doesn't need to be closed.

I hope you understand,

Max

MO and meta.MO over SSL?

theojf — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 12:48:52 -0800

How hard would it be to set up versions of Mathoverflow and meta.Mathoverflow that work over https? I know less than I ought to about computer security (but I think more than the average netizen). The impression I have is that for any website where I log in (especially anything that keeps track of me by cookies --- and mathoverflow uses cookies heavily to provide its functionality) I should prefer https / SSL connections. The point is that cookies often have enough information to steal account information, and and generally broadcast completely in the clear.

It's not a huge deal for me. When I'm at home I'm on a secure network. When I'm at an airport, I can set up a full SSL tunnel through Berkeley's library. (On the other hand, I think when I'm on campus I'm using an insecure network; maybe I should just run the tunnel everywhere by default.) Still, "https://secure.mathoverflow.net/" would be awesome.

Commenting without reputation

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:09:07 -0800

Apparently, you need some reputation even to leave a comment to answers to your own questions. That seems unnecessarily strict.

Stack Exchange API

apetresc — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 06:42:43 -0700

Hey guys,

I gathered from a previous post that Math Overflow is in no rush to switch over to the Stack Exchange 2.0 platform, but can anyone comment on plans for at least implementing the Stack Exchange API that is part of that release? There are a lot of really great applications being built on top of that API that work on pretty much every SE site out there except for Math Overflow, and it's a real pity. I'm sure a lot of the users here would find them very useful.

Is there any plans, now or in the future, to update Math Overflow's software in this way, or is it essentially a fork at this point that will never merge with upstream?

Thanks, Adrian

Collaborative math news tab

E.S — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 06:46:14 -0700

Twitter does best to disseminate news instantly but when it comes to “math on twitter,” I have the problem of not knowing whom to follow so that I keep abreast of recent developments in math (both general and specialization-specific). So is there any chance a news page will be added where users add decent news and remove indecent ones? I hope moderators would give this a serious consideration.

Any way to hide the new badge notice?

David Speyer — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 17:52:07 -0700

First of all, this question is going to make me look completely obnoxious. Sorry about that.

Is there any way that the "You have received a new badge" notification could be turned off in cases where a user has received the badge many times before? Or at least make it remember that I closed the notification (clicked on the X) without me having to click over to my profile and click back to the main site?

I've got a lot of "Nice Answers". It really isn't exciting anymore to click over to my profile and work out which answer received its tenth vote, it's just sort of annoying.

Thanks!

Afternoon tea, and other forums for discussion

Dylan Wilson — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 04:36:50 -0700

MO is a place to ask research-level questions. MO also has the following tags: "soft-question" and "big-list". I think these two faces of MO sometimes get miffed at the others existence, even though we all have inquiries (posted on MO or not) that lie on both sides.

Now, we have a place to discuss research (MO), we have a place to discuss the place where we discuss research (meta), and we also have a place to discuss precisely how miffed we are when the place where we discuss research has stuff on it that isn't really research (also meta). Comments on such borderline questions often have the statement: "This is a discussion for afternoon tea."

So why don't we make Afternoon Tea? Put a link on MO, next to the link to meta, that just says "Afternoon Tea." Make it a forum precisely in the style of this meta (maybe a bit more colorful), and direct *all* discussion-y, big-list, poll-type, soft questions there. This alleviates the miffitude while still placing important discussion-y questions in a place that will receive traffic from research-level mathematicians (why? because everyone gets bored, and if nothing scandalous is happening on meta at the time then procrastinating mathematicians might click on "Afternoon Tea" instead. This is especially true if they are currently craving tea.)

So that's my thought. Maybe it's already been thunk.

Is there an API for mathoverflow?

nabeelmukhtar — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:40:30 -0700

Hi all
I was wondering if there is an API for accessing mathoverflow site. StackExchange has recently released an API so I think it shouldn't be too difficult to upgrade the mathoverflow site so that we have an API for accessing its questions.

Regards
Nabeel Mukhtar

suspension

Scott Morrison — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:06:32 -0700

I've just suspended a user who has been asking lots of questions recently, at least half of which have been closed. The user hadn't provided any contact details, so I left a comment on one of his posts asking him to contact me by email (scott@tqft.net). Since leaving that comment, the user has continued asking questions. I had hoped to discuss his questions with him, as his activity has reached the point that it's annoying many users. I'm interpreting his behaviour as unwillingness to discuss the situation with me, so I decided to enforce a suspension until this becomes possible. In part, this was triggered by the fact that the user is anonymous, and has chosen not to provide the moderators with a contact email: we have a pretty clear policy that anonymity is fine, but you should expect much less sympathy from the moderators if you choose to stay anonymous but then cause complaints.

I realise that this might be considered inappropriate behaviour on my part, so I'm reporting the details here in case the community wants to overrule me. Suspensions are easy to clear, so this action can be undone immediately.

Let fly! :-)

SE universal Rep

sean tilson — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:36:22 -0700

There are certain sites that are directly related to MO or other sites. The specific example I am thinking of is Math.SE. The suggestion is that MO rep be added to an associated Math.SE amount of rep.

Unwelcome questions / clarifying scope

shreevatsa — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:47:38 -0700

(Continuing from here, though it's probably irrelevant now.)

MathOverflow gets a fair number of questions that are not research-level, and are quickly closed. In most cases, this seems to happen because the user thinks MO is the math equivalent of Stack Overflow, and does not know what sort of questions are acceptable. Part of the reason I think is that the "Ask a Question" page does not mention anything about this: there is a "Please read the FAQ…" message, but it's almost an axiom of user-interface design that no one reads instructions! There is a "How to write math" on the right, and it has happened that some newbie spent a lot of time learning LaTeX and formatting a question carefully, only to have it quickly closed. On Stack Overflow's Ask a Question, there is a brief message to the right on what sort of questions to ask — in the place where MO has "How to write math". It continues to be displayed while you type the question title, and only when you start typing the text of the question does the message change to formatting instructions. Something like this would be easy to implement here too, I think?

Of course, once math.stackexchange.com goes into Public beta tomorrow, this will probably be less of a problem, but I still think it would be polite and nicer to people who arrive here by mistake to clarify all this (and direct them elsewhere) on the Ask a Question page. There's no guarantee that everyone will read the more visible instructions either, but it's a trivial change that could help quite a bit.

Report bugs with LaTeX (jsMath) rendering here.

Scott Morrison — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:05:42 -0800

Please report bugs or feature requests for mathoverflow's recent jsMath support here.

Known issue: after you add a comment, LaTeX in comments doesn't render. This is because at present we only do a single rendering pass, so any page content that is dynamically generated later won't be rendered.

Known issue: we don't render the LaTeX in the preview box as you type a question or answer. This is top of the todo list.

CW threshold vs. nitpicking edits

Bill Dubuque — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:02:49 -0700

Does MO have some explicit policy that encourages edits that are nitpicking? (e.g. correction of typos). Imho such edits should be reserved for more serious matters since, e.g. if a few people fix typos then that may discourage a 4th user from making a more serious correction for fear of bumping the post to CW. Nitpickers should keep in mind that not every typo-laden author has control over such, e.g. I know a few people who have RSI problems so severe that it is a pain (literally) to fix typos, and others who suffer from dyslexia, etc. Such individuals should not have to worry about their posts being pushed into CW much sooner due to the whims of pedantic editors.

Also, please keep in mind that some people will purposely break rules of grammar, punctuation, etc in order to better maintain control of how things are rendered (e.g. contractions needed to keep a sentence from overflowing to another line thus destroying explicitly designed spatial proximity between two semantically connected mathematical items). In fact I do such quite heavily in text-based forums (e.g. usenet newsgroups) and while it is harder to maintain such control say in html, it still can be done to a limited extent. So why risk the possibility of destroying such carefully crafted semantical structure for nitpicking syntactical corrections? After all, we're here to discuss mathematics - not grammar.

Meta-meta-MO: Re-order the Category for Start Discussion Form

WillieWong — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:16:35 -0700

Is it possible to re-order the category listing (or change the default) on the "Start a new discussion" form?

I ask because I am pedantic and have seen a few discussions here on Meta that accidentally ended up under "Feature Requests", presumeably because the poster was not completely familiar with the interface and the form defaults to it. I think a more sensible default value for the category should be "General" or "Community".

"Trivial edits"

WillieWong — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:20:17 -0700

Inspired by a recent discussion on Meta, I wonder if the following is a reasonable request of a feature for the software to have?

At the time of the edit, the user can specify if the edit is trivial (for fixing minor things like spelling or punctuation) or major (for mathematical mistakes or new content or something like that). Trivial fixes don't count toward the "8-edit and CW rule" but also don't bump the question on the home page. Major edits do.

If you think this request if reasonable, please also post some comment on how to better refine the differences between the two!

Help, 8 edits turned my reply into Community Wiki

Bill Dubuque — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:55:21 -0700

Being new to MO, I took advantage of my recent post [1] to experiment with jsmath, in the process doing more than 8 edits - not realizing this would turn it into CW. I most emphatically did not want that. Is there any way to undo the CW? It seems bizarre that 8 edits should do that. It makes no sense to me why there should be any correlation between edits by the author and CW. Rather than discouraging elaborations, corrections, etc, they should be encouraged.

If there is no way to undo the CW how can I delete the post and repost it?

[1] http://mathoverflow.net/questions/32133/expressing-adja-as-a-polynomial-in-a/32343#32343

comments appear randomly shuffled

muad — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:38:50 -0700

Am I the only one who is hopelessly confused by the apparently random ordering (I suppose it's a mixture of time posted and rating) of comments? for example http://mathoverflow.net/questions/28158/a-learning-roadmap-request-from-high-school-to-mid-undergraduate-studies

"hot" vs. "active"

Ryan Budney — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:42:32 -0700

On the main mathoverflow page, there are tabs "hot" and "active".

If you let your mouse hang over those buttons, little descriptions come up.

Hot - "questions with the most activity and interest within the last few days"

Active - "questions that have been asked, answered or updated recently".

I find the blurbs don't match up with reality.

Q: What is the algorithm to decide the rankings on the "hot" and "active" pages?

I find the "active" page to be reasonably useful. But the "hot" page gives me a listing of questions that have few votes, and no answers. If anything the "hot" page should be called the "inactive" page.

Favorite questions: update notifications by email?

Kevin Lin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:34:15 -0700

Sorry if this has already been addressed before, but what does "favoriting" questions do, besides put the question in a list in your user profile?

Is there any way that you can get email notifications of updates to your favorite questions?

Linking in with StackOverlow & al

Jacques Carette — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:48:32 -0700

Is it being considered to move to StackExchange 2.0, so that one's MathOverflow account can be properly linked with other accounts on like sites?

Too Many Textbooks On…? Too Few Textbooks On…?

Andy Putman — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:53:54 -0700

There are currently 4/5 votes to close and 10 answers to this question : http://mathoverflow.net/questions/31002/

While I didn't vote to close, the question seems a bit broad and argumentative. What do people think?

Questions not properly justified

Charles Rezk — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:04:23 -0700

I've just realized that, with the past day or so, questions at the top of a question page are not being justified at the left-hand edge of the page, but rather start after the right-hand edge of the "mathoverflow" logo.

For instance, see http://mathoverflow.net/questions/29913/map-of-manifolds-inducing-iso-on-top-cohomology-but-not-surjective-on-one-other
The line starts too far to the right, although it wraps to the left-hand edge of the page. This phenomenon is visible on every question page.

Two checkboxes when submitting questions

djordan — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:08:48 -0700

Hi all,

Great site, thanks to the moderators and creators! I wonder if it would be worthwhile to include the following two checkboxes when submitting questions?

1) This is not a homework problem for a course in which I am enrolled.
2) I have performed a few internet searches and looked at wikipedia and have not found a satisfactory answer.

This would have the effect of making it truly unethical to post hw questions, hopefully reducing the number of them, and also would eliminate the need for "Is this a homework question?" and "Have you performed a google search?" to appear in the comments under the question. I know one doesn't want to discourage asking of questions, but I thought it might be a worthwhile streamline. The other day I was about to ask a question about reflection groups over finite fields and thought to search google first - I found my answer without using up anyone's time!

thanks,
-david

Moderator mailing alias?

Scott Morrison — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:16:19 -0700

Can we create an alias for all the moderators at mathoverflow? Ideally just moderators@mathoverflow.net, forwarding to all of us.

I'm not sure if Anton can do this directly via DNS. Alternatively, it may be possible to point mathoverflow.net to mathoverflow.tqft.net for email purposes (there's a separate set of DNS entries for email), and then I could do the aliasing on my end. This might mess up existing email accounts @mathoverflow.net.

I guess I can just make up addresses under the .tqft.net domain if that's the best we can do.

Can I have more say in how I can give away my own rep?

Kevin Buzzard — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 02:06:02 -0700

I am giving a course which occasionally features some basic arguments from functional analysis. I am giving a lecture today, and when I was looking through my notes last night I noticed a hole in one of the arguments I was going to present. I was at home, far from the friendly analysts down the corridor (and I am no analyst myself). "In desperation" I thought I could ask MO instead, so I did:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/27521/injection-between-non-isomorphic-irreducible-hilbert-space-reps

What was going on in practice was that I ideally needed an answer within 14 hours. Now the nice thing about MO is that it's not at all unreasonable to expect that a sufficiently basic graduate level question might well get answered within 14 hours, and probably a lot more quickly. But I have reputation to spare and I wanted to make sure, so my plan was to offer a reasonable bounty, not because I thought the question was hard, but because I wanted an answer ASAP.

I then found I couldn't give out a bounty :-( because the question had to be open for 2 days.

So here's a generic statement/question---occasionally I might want to reward a quick answer. How can this possibly be built in to the system?

The most naive idea would be to argue that I should be able to offer a bounty immediately. I imagine that this is not possible because of potential abuses of the system (either "let's both log on at 10:00, I'll ask a question, you answer it, I'll accept and you can get that 500 rep you need", or perhaps "I'll log on at 10:00 with both my accounts and then transfer 500 rep from one to the other"). It's not clear to me whether these things could or would actually occur, but I am guessing that is the logic which inspired the no early bounty feature.

But there are more complex ideas, of the form "I can guarantee that there will be a bounty on this question within 2 days, and you can have it if you answer quick", which could be implemented.

Note also that any user who wants to transfer 500 rep from one of his accounts to the other can still probably do this, by asking a generic question, waiting two days, and then accepting an answer from another account...aah, I see the problem. It's hard for a non-mathematician to ask a generic question which won't be closed within 2 days, and presumably you can't offer a bounty on a closed question.

Anyway, that was the situation I found myself in. I wanted to reward the guy who answered quickly, but I can't. I could have waited 2 days, offered a bounty, and then instantly accepted his answer, but I thought this was a bit ridiculous. In particular I could see no reason not to instantly accept the answer the moment I realised it answered the question perfectly. The speed was just a bonus.

Perhaps the "speed" issue is something that comes up sufficiently rarely that this is not worth thinking about? As you can see, I can't formulate an explicit proposal for a feature which would have helped me out here. On the other hand I felt that MO wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do, so I thought I'd mention it here before I forgot.

General mathematics StackExchange site

Scott Morrison — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:17:47 -0700

There's currently a process going on at Area51 to propose and create new StackExchange 2.0 sites. A general mathematics (i.e. not research level) site has been proposed, and they have a list of on-topic and off-topic questions to help define the scope of the site. At this point, they want a certain number of people to "commit" to participating in the site, as a way of ensuring that it's viable. If you're interested, you may want to head over and sign up.

Now, I'm not actually planning to regularly use a "general mathematics" StackExchange 2.0 site, because my understanding is that it would be rather dull! :-) On the other hand, I think it might be very useful for us if such a site existed, so we could point people there. In fact, it may become possible in the near future to actually migrate questions there rather than just closing them! As such, I'm not going to hesitate "gaming the Area 51 system" for our selfish ends.

(Full disclosure: the link I gave has a referrer code in it corresponding to my Area51 account. To my understanding, the effect of this is that if you "commit" it will say something like "Referred by Scott Morrison" under your name in the list. Here's a clean link if you prefer.)

Accidentally flagging comment as offensive

Joseph O'Rourke — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 05:13:47 -0700

I just did this, not understanding the interface, in this question: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/28695/what-should-we-teach-to-liberal-arts-students-who-will-take-only-one-math-course . I intended to vote the comment up, misclicked, then misinterpreted the dialog box.
Sorry! I hope I am not the only one confused by how that works. :-/ There seems to be no way to UnDo.
Should not happen again.

Closing answered but lingering questions

Joseph O'Rourke — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 05:04:40 -0700

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/17048/compute-the-centroid-of-a-3d-planar-polygon

As a relative newcomer, I am noticing something of which you long-timers must all be aware:
Some questions are pretty much closed in the comments, or even in the answers, but they linger on,
either because the poser can't select comments as answers, or because the poser is not attending.
And the random MO background process keeps bumping them to the top of the active list.
I notice it with this 3D polygon question because that is a perfect topic for me, so it catches my
eye, but it is effectively closed and has been for two months. Just yesterday JBL complained about it lingering on.
I'm not offering a solution, just pointing out a problem.

Concerning the "closed in comments" situation, I wonder if it is possible for the poser to answer their own question (by reformulating the comments) and then accept their own answer? This might solve some of the lingering problems, but
those lingering due to inattention or other reasons would continue to linger. Letting them languish forever would be fine
except for the process-bumping.

Latex on the questions page?

Max Muller — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 06:55:26 -0700

Dear moderators and enthusiastic (meta-)math-overflow users,

In the 'questions'-page of mathoverflow, which is the homepage of the website as well,
the LaTeX isn't displayed in the title of the questions. Well, it isn't displayed on my computer interface... Am I the only
one who has to deal with this problem? Or is this normal? If it is 'normal', wouldn't it be a good idea to try to improve the
website by showing the math in the titles of the questions?

Viewing just questions for a favorite but infrequently used tag requires manually typing the url?

Linda Brown Westrick — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 22:50:51 -0700

Whenever I am staring at the list of questions, there is a list of tags on the right. Clicking on one of them (set theory, let's say) takes me to mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/set-theory where I can see only the questions about set theory. However, not all the tags are listed (because there are too many tags, perhaps). For a tag that that has too few entries to make the list (for example, model-theory), the only way I've found to navigate to mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/model-theory is to manually enter it into the address bar. I know that typing things into the address bar is in some sense the intended search method, but for the sake of convenience I propose

Feature request: It would be cool if my interesting-tags could always appear on the right even if they are not getting many hits.

First question

Andres Caicedo — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:20:09 -0700

Hi,
[Let me first say that I do not want to start controversies, this is just a feature that seems reasonable to me, and if you disagree, that is fine.]

It seems desirable that the first question by new users is not posted until approved by a moderator. Once this happens, the user would then be able to post as usual.

This way we would weed out a *lot* of the homework questions that we seem to be getting all the time. Of course, it would increase the work of moderators, but I would expect that serious questions and users would be obvious to identify, and those that seem to require some discussion could perhaps be posted here first (by a moderator) to decide on their approval. If we leave the vote down/close system that is already in place, that would take care of those inappropriate questions that went through the filter unnoticed.

Just an idea.

More on comments

J. H. S. — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:30:25 -0700

Is there a way for one to get the complete list of his/her comments? Well, I guess I have to add an extra hypothesis there because you always have the possibility of recalling first all the threads wherein you've left a comment and then proceed on to taking a look at each one of them and tallying them in scrap paper or something. So, yes... Is there a short way for one to see the complete list of his/her comments?

A way to deal with badly-written questions

Ilya Grigoriev — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 00:53:44 -0700

There are many badly-written questions on mathoverflow, and it seems obvious that the site would be improved if they were rewritten (whether this means that the question is made more pointed & precise, LaTeXing is improved, or paragraph-breaks are introduced). Currently, they either kludge along and prevent better-written questions on the same topics from being asked, or are closed, which mainly results in fresh people looking at them being unable to contribute any interesting answers on one-hand, and also in any good answers already there being forgotten. It seems to me that it's too rare that they are edited and made better questions (unless there is an actual math mistake).

Some other threads on this topic:
http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/409/best-practice-for-flawed-questions/
http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/418/why-is-the-hahnbanach-thorem-so-important/

Here's an outline of an idea of how this could be improved. It's science-fiction so far, but if people like the idea, it could be improved and posted on stackexchange meta. In any case, I'm mainly interested in whether people like this philosophy.

--------------------------

Apart from voting on a question (which seems so far to mainly represent how much people want it answered), people of certain reputation (more than 100, less than 3000) should also be able to vote on whether "this question is well-written" or "this question is badly-written" and leave comments with their vote. Hopefully, this alone will motivate the author to edit.

If the "badly-written" votes vastly outnumber the good votes, the question should be put in limbo. This should have a few effects:

- It should be removed from the front page, perhaps. It should certainly be added to a separate "limbo" section of the site.
- The reputation cap needed to edit the question should be dramatically lowered.
- It should probably still allow new answers (but people should be warned off by its limbo status)

If the question stays long enough in limbo, it should be closed automatically. If people vote strongly enough it's well-written, it should reopen. But, most importantly: the original author and others should be able to edit it, and when they do they should be able to check a box saying "The question is now good enough to be out of limbo". Then, it should be immediately taken out of limbo. To prevent abuse, the author should only be able to do this twice or thrice, any other person - once, and it should be easier to put the question back in limbo afterwards. Also, perhaps the reputation needed for people to check this box (if they are not the author) should be higher.

There should of course be appropriate reputation bonuses/perhaps penalties for all of this.

I think this should be good enough to motivate people to improve questions, and reward people for doing so. Please say if you think it's a good idea or just deranged rambling of a sleepy mind.

LaTeX in comments

Mariano — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:29:47 -0800

When one clicks on the 'Show N more comments' thingie on, say, a question, the LaTeX rendering of comments which were visible goes away. IIRC, it used to be the case that the old comments stayed rendered but the newly displayed ones did not have their latex rendered...

Classic questions

vipul — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:16:44 -0700

Now that MO's been around for about seven months or so, a lot of questions of general interest (typically, labeled "community wiki", "big-list", "soft-question", etc) have accumulated. These typically garner about 15-50 votes, get a bunch of 20-25 answers, and then die out. (For instance: common errors in mathematics, funny things in mathematics papers, trends in what mathematicians should know, selecting problems for students ...)

It would be good to have these questions accessible and perhaps even randomly shown on the front page occasionally, so that the questions don't get buried and new participants can quickly see these questions and contribute answers. This way, the answer lists to these questions can keep improving. It also might encourage participation because these questions can often easily be answered based on personal experience and don't require on-the-spot mathematical thinking.

Along these lines, I thought of something like a "classic" tab that displays questions that satisfy some or all of these criteria: (i) are community wiki and/or big list (ii) got at least x votes (where x could be 15 or 20 or 30) (iii) got at least y answers (where y could be 5 or 10 or 20) (iv) got at least z votes (where z could be 1K or 2K), and (v) is at least two weeks old (because recent questions are displayed in the front anyway).

This is just a very rough idea and I don't know about its suitability or appeal to MO users.

What benefit do we get from using markdown?

Peter McNamara — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:17:19 -0700

There may well be a positive answer to the question that forms the title of this post. As a user of mathoverflow, I don't know what it is though. My primary experience with the markdown is seeing peoples posts where there has been obvious struggles to fight the incompatabilities between markdown and latex. This seems most prominent with the use of the characters * and _.

I do not see the point of allowing the use of these symbols in markdown, and wish that we could disable them so that they don't interfere with our latex. As far as I can tell, their behaviour in markdown doesn't actually contribute anything new, since one can recreate the same effects using html. Thus, if we could drop these symbols from markdown, we wouldn't lose any capabilities that we already have. This is my 'feature request'.

Support VA's request for a gmail lab feature for displaying math

Regenbogen — Sat, 15 May 2010 13:32:48 -0700

VA has created a nice greasemonkey script for displaying mathematics in LaTeX in any webpage, and also he has made a gmail lab request for the same for doing it inside gmail.

If more people support it, then it would be probably be implemented by them. So please go over there and .. . ...

Twitter

Regenbogen — Thu, 06 May 2010 11:59:28 -0700

Important news and changes at MO could be announced thru twitter?

Major Changes to an Answer

Bill Johnson — Mon, 10 May 2010 01:16:48 -0700

I noticed that after making a major change or addition to an answer, the thread does not move up the queu and (I think) the owner of the thread is not notified. Do you have to start a new answer to get action?

lie-algebra vs. lie-algebras

Mariano — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:41:12 -0700

I doubt there is any use in having the two tags lie-algebra and lie-algebras. Since one of them has some 25 times more posts, the other could probably be merged into it.

Comment notifications

Kevin Lin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:59:28 -0700

It seems that I don't get notifications when someone has written a comment after I've made a comment on some question/answer. Am I supposed to be getting notifications? I seem to remember getting such notifications before, but maybe I am misremembering. Is there a setting to turn this on/off?

CSS style for math classes to remove underline in titles

Dror Speiser — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:35:09 -0700

This kind of went under the radar.

Feature request - add a css style that makes the math classes have no underline when they are in a link.
This will mostly apply to the title of a question when it contains latex.
It is simple to carry out and I don't see an immediate down side. (reason for post - maybe you do)

What do you know about Russian(or Soviet Union)'s mathematical education system?

ShizhuoZhang — Sun, 02 May 2010 03:17:49 -0700

I am not sure whether this question is appropriate for MO because what I want to ask is about "starting early in mathematics" But I saw there was one question about this was closed as" not real a question" and others did not like this question for they thought this kind of questions could discourage people who want to do mathematics.
Nevertheless, I am really interested in this question.

Why am I interested in this question? Last week ,when I was taking the lecturing course on noncommutative algebraic geometry by my advisor. We are required to do some exercises which looks very abstract(of course with rich meaning in representation theory but not easy to understand). Then my advisor told us that in the Kolmogorov' times. Teachers taught set theory in usual elementary school at first grade and Axiomatic geometry at second grade. I think what he talked about is something equivalent to "set theory", say taught students to do some set manipulating without telling them the precise definition.

It seems that many Russian mathematicians began very early, my advisor told me that when they were 16, they could play algebraic geometry and attended Gelfand and Manin's seminar to learn mathematics. He also told me that it seems that there existed some special school called" secondary mathematical school" which was founded by Dynkin to cultivate mathematicians

What do you know about the Russian(or Soviet Union)'s mathematical education system?

I think I can tag "mathematical history" or"mathematical education"here, but I am really not sure whether this question is good for MO. It is just my own curiosity.

Could we close the topic on overloaded words in mathematics?

Harry Gindi — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:24:08 -0700

I never thought this was a particularly good question, and I think that it's time to close it:

What are the most overloaded words in mathematics?

Trackbacks to arXiv?

José Figueroa — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:58:37 -0800

I was wondering whether it would be possible to implement some sort of trackback to arXiv every time that an eprint gets mentioned (by which i mean linked) in MO. MO discussions are generally quite useful and I think that it would add valuable information to an eprint if one could see whether it has been discussed somewhere in MO.

I think we should not vote to close on "borderline" questions

Noah Snyder — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:36:35 -0700

Somewhat often someone will ask a "borderline" question on MO. These tend to result in much discussion on meta. Often we will close such a question, despite it being somewhat controversial. This is especially easy now that a lot of people have the ability to vote to close. What I'm going to argue for here is that we *should not vote to close borderline questions*. (We should, of course, still quickly vote to close questions that are obviously not appropriate. The big upside of having so many 3K+ voters is that we can close very bad questions really quickly.)

Here are my reasons:
1) There aren't borderline questions frequently enough for them to cause a problem. If a particular sort of borderline question starts to become a problem we can deal with it then.
2) Closing questions can lead to unhappiness, so we shouldn't do so without a good reason.
3) Sometimes questions that appear "borderline" actually are excellent questions if the right person happens across it. The recent laTeX controversy is a good example (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22141/how-do-i-see-latex-math-on-any-web-page). If you reason to vote to close is "MO probably doesn't have the right people to answer this question" then I think instead of closing you should just wait to see if the right person happens to show up.
4) By letting a few more borderline questions get through we'll be better informed about what does and doesn't work well on MO.

Thoughts? Comments? Disagreements?

A modest proposal

Will Jagy — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:05:02 -0700

I noticed a question today in which an annoyed comment was posted, see
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22532

I wrote to Theo and he suggested I put something on Meta, so here it is.
One of Theo's phrases "Do you realize that quadruple question marks are unlikely to get your question taken seriously here" gave me an idea, which is that people be unable to post any question until they have been registered for, say, a week.

This still allows the same privacy the site currently supports, makes no judgements on what they do eventually. All it does is force someone to an extra step and a week of staring at the site before they get to ask for help. This will not change anything with people who are really dedicated to getting something for nothing, but might give pause to the average high-school student or crank. That is, the question "Do you realize" might have an affirmative answer for some, given a little lead time.

If I can figure out how to re-enter Meta after leaving it I will look at responses in the coming days. However, as always, I welcome individual replies, search for my last name at http://www.ams.org/cml

William C. Jagy
Berkeley, CA

Why are half of the topics on the front page bumped by Charles Stewart?

Steven Gubkin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:01:16 -0700

The [general] tag

rwbarton — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:18:54 -0700

The list of questions tagged [general] is rather an odd mix of non-questions, decent questions without appropriate tags, and soft questions of various sorts. I wonder (a) whether the [general] tag should exist at all, and (b) whether it is worth doing something about the existing instances of this tag.

Do Tanisaki and Kashiwara publish a new book?

ShizhuoZhang — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:43:26 -0700

I think this question is not appropriate for MO, so I asked here. Some one told me that they had a new book talking about affine flags and schubert cell to calculate the intersection cohomologies and Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomial. But he did not remember the title for the book. I searched on google but nothing found. Anybody here know?

Thank you

[Redacted]

Harry Gindi — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:00:02 -0800

Answers are sorted by reputation, big list

jonas — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:42:15 -0700

It seems that answers to questions are sorted by (correct marking and then) reputation. This is nice for ordinary mathematical questions, where if someone has the same problem and finds the question, he'll see the best answers first.

It, however, doesn't work well for open-ended big list questions. It's not easy to follow new answers to such a question once you've read the thread, because they don't appear at the end of the list. After a while, what starts to happen is that people only read the first few pages of answers, and new answers aren't seen because they start out near the last page (because they have zero rep).

I'm not sure I know a good solution for this, but you could at least try sorting big list questions by post time, earliest first.

Update: of course, early answers are _always_ favoured to get more rep, no matter the ordering of the answers, because many people will only read a question once, vote on the answers, and never come back. At least that's what happens on perlmonks, it might be different here. Still, ordering by time makes this worse because it's much harder to find new answers.

MO Quote Board?

François G. Dorais — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:06:38 -0700

We've all seen some very funny comments on MO. Since comments aren't searchable (yet), it's nearly impossible to keep track of them. Funny quote boards are always fun to read. I don't think a [big-list] quote board is a good idea, but it might be fun to keep one somewhere else. It might even be good publicity for MO...

How to search comments

grp — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:40:39 -0700

I want the search on the front page to search the text of comments as well, or have the help for search tell me how to include comments in the search. It seems not to work: searching for abundant gets a question on abundant numbers answered by Michael Lugo, while searching by my name does not bring up this question, in spite of the many comments I left.

Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2010.04.10

Yes, I am a human being (at least, for MO posting purposes)

fedja — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:44:34 -0700

This verification actually acts on my nerves. I was checked 3 times today and that isn't the record. Is it possible to disable it for the registered users with at least 1K reputation?

Why community wiki?

AS — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:05:39 -0800

The question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/13851/the-inverse-galois-problem-and-the-monster was made a community wiki question - which doesn't make any sense to me, and now it even looks like I asked the question myself, which is not true - and also my answer was made "community wiki". Is there any good reason for this? (I can't think of one :))