The question is closed now anyway, and I have nothing more to add I don't think.

I'm afraid I'm going to cast a vote to close.

Andy's reverse argument doesn't work. I wish it did. Unfortunately, for it to work then the tagging system would have to be a lot more consistently used, and the "ignoring" system actually do what it says on the tin. I have some tags as "favourite" but it's almost useless for me. In fact, I tend only to use the tags when the question title and the first couple of lines don't tell me enough about the question - the reverse of what I would have to do for the separation by tags method to work.

If the "goofing off", "subjective", "historical", "professional" type questions were all appropriately tagged

and if I could speak Norwegian then I'd find life in Norway much less confusing. Unfortunately, the two events are about as likely so I don't see the point in playing "what if" games about idealised situations.

The wider point is that it is much easier to amalgamate two separate sites, say via a feed reader or even just having two tabs open in your browser (good grief, how much effort does that take?) than to separate one site into two streams.

To Mariano, may I remind you that it wasn't so much the answer itself that gave me cause for misgivings. I agree that that answer was written sensitively and carefully, but it could so easily have been done badly, and so easily have been offensive. That it wasn't is a happy (!) chance and I'm not sure that we'd be so lucky next time.

To Theo: I am certainly not trying to "keep everything happy". I am trying to "keep everything mathematical".

Deane: Thank you. That's actually all I'm asking for. If each "side" remembers that the other side is also present on the site and that their own preferences are not universally acknowledged as a truth, then each will moderate their behaviour and both will find that the site is big enough to accommodate them.

That said, I strongly oppose any sort of "keep everything happy" policy. Of course, we have rightly closed questions from depressed students who should seek support elsewhere. But the answer in question was respectful and accurate, and anyway I don't like the idea that everything must necessarily be happy for it to be appropriate. (Cue rant about antidepressants and advertisements for them.)

MO is a very public place. I recommend that we act accordingly.

I could not agree more! But I absolutely do not see what is objectionable in Gerry's post, what possible reservation there can be in making it in a public place. Harry's behavior during the Bad Old Days was of a completely different nature, and its inappropriateness was quite orthogonal to its publicity: I simply cannot see what connection there is between these two things.

Anyone saying that something is impossible is liable to interrupted by some fool doing it.

I offer you https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leet-key/

But I confess to enjoying quite a bit what working mathematicians have to say about both the solid math questions as well as the messy subjective stuff. And I like being able to go to one place to see both. I don't know about the rest of you, but I just don't have time to check out and contribute to more than one site like this.

Why should I have to wade through it all just because you like it? If it is separate, I can easily choose to ignore it whilst it really isn't any more difficult for you to check two sites than one.

I want MathOverflow to be part of my working life, not my goofing off life. I find that my working day splits in to three types of activity: focussed research, wide-gaze mathematics, and "goofing off". My struggle is always to maximise the focussed research, but sometimes I just need a few minutes "goofing off" to recharge. Now, MO can't be part of my focussed research - that's when I'm trying to answer questions that I hope no-one else has a clue how to answer! But it can be a part of my "wide-gaze" work and I find it extremely useful at that point. But if it starts creeping in to the "goofing off" part, then it loses any value that it might have otherwise had.

There are plenty of blogs, forums, and other places out there for the "messy" stuff, which don't have quite such as high profile as MO and so are easier to be more informal. If it doesn't fit on MO that doesn't make it a Bad Thing, just not in MO's back yard.

I'm also curious about the human side of mathematics. But there are plenty of places to learn about such matters. There aren't many places like MO. I'm afraid that "I like being able to go to one place to see both" just isn't even an argument. As the old advert had it: "Take two bottles of shampoo into the shower? I just RSS and go."

Mariano: I know that you didn't really mean '18+', but your underlying assumption was that everyone reading MO was as mature as you. Sadly, I doubt that very much. MO is a very public place. I recommend that we act accordingly. After all, wasn't that the argument we kept throwing at Harry in the Bad Old Days? That his actions here would echo down the corridors of academia for generations? Shouldn't we also think about that?

an_mo_user: Yeah, I got confused. But if I can get so confused, so can anyone else. And the fact that this question, which seems innocent enough, could provoke such an answer underlies my point about keeping MO for focussed research questions.

On the wider SE network, it is no longer possible to ask CW questions up front (they can be made CW by a moderator later). There's a reason for that: they want to keep the quality of the questions high and they found that CW questions generally didn't contribute much to that level of quality.

If there's something that "ought" to be rot13'd or have a health warning then it isn't appropriate for MO.

I absolutely agree with this statement. Besides, I don't think web browsers generally have rot13 built in the way any decent usenet reader does. This makes rot13 rather useless in web fora, since only the most determined peepers will bother to un-rot13.

A tactful description of facts need not be obscured: we are adults.

I don't remember having to confirm that I was over 18 when I signed up for MO. Where did it say that? Even if it did, the website is still public and there is no "You must be 18 or older to view this website.". I actually find it slightly ironic that a mathematician made this statement! It's like being in a seminar on foundations of mathematics and only in the questions afterwards does the speaker say, "Of course, I'm assuming the Axiom of Choice in all of this.".

MO is a professional website, and it is a public professional website. So we should actually be more formal than in a seminar. The seminar test is the bare minimum.

But as I said before, my concern is not with the answer per se, but with the question that gave rise to it. That is not a suitable MO question, IMO.

A tactful description of facts need not be obscured: we are adults. In particular, Gerry's post very precisely gives a historical example of a paper which did not appear, and explains the reason---it is on-topic, and to the point. It is tragic that that happened, of course, but it did happen. Since neither Gerry turned his post into a gory description of the tragedy, which would have been completely our of place, nor the ensuing comments did anything remotely similar to that, I really do not see what the problem is.

Mathematics is a human activity, with all the good and all the bad that that implies.

A good four fifths of newspapers would have to be rot13ed...

I notice with some dismay that this question got highlighted on the "Not Even Wrong" blog as an example of how even in the tight confines of MO mathematicians can still "let their hair down". That bothers me. I would much rather that the first thing that comes to someone's mind when they think of MO is that it has led to (for example) many papers, or some unsolved conjectures being solved, or similar stuff - basically, the "success stories of MO" thread here, rather than that it's where people can get talk about mathematical urban myths. Given that people will naturally gravitate to the slightly odd and bizarre, the only way to ensure this impression of MO is to be strict in keeping stuff like this out.

The event itself was deeply inappropriate, to say the least.

You are a master of understatement.

The event itself was deeply inappropriate, to say the least. Relaying the story in a sober, factual way is not: in my opinion, of course.

It may be something with the accents in our names...

You are the best. Ever.