Thank you for your comments. I would like to emphasize that I did not want to make a spectacle out of this and especially did not want to create more tasks for the moderators. Following Anton's lead in the last thread, I will remove the link in the original post. After all, my reason for starting this thread was not about these particular questions but more academic: I was really curious to see if there are protocols on these matters. All your comments raised excellent points, and perhaps at this point the best solution is to use our common sense and let the sun does its job!

Yours,

Long

PS: if you are new to the thread and would like to see the actual link in my post, please feel free to email me.

... especially after somebody here not so long ago tried to delete all his questions after they were answered.

That was a weird situation. The software normally won't allow the OP to delete a question that has a substantive answer (one with at least 2 upvotes), and those cases the software just barely failed to recognize the answers as substantive. I'm still planning to write a script to walk through the database each month to look for questions with substantive-looking answers that have been deleted by the OP, but I've been pretty busy lately.

If a question is poorly motivated, asked by an anonymous user, or the asker is not engaged, you're welcome to not answer it. But if it is coherent and interesting, it seems strange to insist that nobody answer it based on the speculation that it is an attempt to cheat in some way. If somebody is cheating, I think it's far better to make it clear that they won't get away with it than to try to prevent them from doing it in the first place. I can't think of any better deterrent than providing a completely public and searchable record who contributed what on MO. The reason to use your real name should not be because you are forced to, but because you want to lay claim to your contributions.

Not only is transparency probably the best solution, it also happens to be easy to implement and unobtrusive.

Finally, I am fairly certain there are serious mathematicians on MO whose usernames are "unknown".

That's certainly true but then asking for motivation usually clarifies the situation a fair bit. If the poster doesn't react, then this should raise an alarm flag. But for some people, the hunt for reputation points is just too tempting (I am not referring to the particular posts in question and not blaming you for answering, since the situation really does seem less clear here).

In any case, as I wrote above, my recollection of Martin's thread was quite different from the points of view expressed so far, so I am curious to hear more comments.

However, these do feel like some kind of honors thesis or even starting point of something bigger. For example, one part of his latest question turns out to be sandwiched between two well-known conjectures, and I have not seen it raised elsewhere. It is possible but unlikely that idle curiosity leads to these group of questions.

Normally I would not think too much about this. After all, sunshine is good (or something like that, sorry English is not my native tongue). But in light of recent events I think I would post this here to see if the moderators and the community have some opinions on this matters. In particular, do we answer such questions? If so, how much should we give? What if a bigger stream of questions arrives?

As I said above, I have nothing against the OP posting these questions. They are nice, I like them and I would probably give similar answers if some graduate students emailed me those questions. What I would like to know is what the community thinks, and whether some consensus has formed over this (somewhat delicate) issue, especially since the OP is anonymous.

I would appreciate your thoughts and comments.