network-wide managers do very little moderation

I seem to recall one case on MSE where an account was closed, and after a question in Meta is was found that it had been closed at the user's request (all his accounts in the entire SE system) by a network-wide manager.

Otherwise the new site looks great. Feels familiar but also looks better.

Who the moderators will be for MO is defined in an agreement Anton Geraschenko mentioned some time ago in the transition thread; in brief and from memory, we keep the current ones and if the need arises there will be elections of new ones in consultation with the current ones. (In general for the SE sites I think moderators are elected by the respective communities, too.) There are some general moderators (SE employees in part or all of them) around, but judging from math.SE (while I am not active there I passively follow their meta since some time in some detail) they rather limit themselves to technical matters (how does this work, why doesn't this work, things like this).

Whoever they are to be, I hope they are also mathematicians who are active on MO and who will continue to be sensitive to our concerns (the interchange with jt, or lack thereof, hasn't been exactly encouraging to me).

And by the way the old MO frontpage was not "newest" but "active" (and was this even different on SE2.0?)., in any case both would be better then this selection.

Your reply about serial voting answers my question, thanks. (Although you might want to edit the sentence that starts "Serial voting is [...] a trade secret but" if it is a trade secret.)

Also, FYI, it's been almost 10 hours but it seems the serial voting mechanism hasn't kicked in yet. Maybe in a while...

<blockquote>

My interest is piqued precisely by specific questions which don't have answers, rather than the massively upvoted musings of very clever mathematicians.

</blockquote>

I second both this sentiment and its implications for the design of the front page.

The old sort was "newest", which I would argue does not reflect a representative sample of questions from the site. Further, most of these newest questions are unanswered and thus not as interesting as some with answers.

This seems to me to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off base for MO. My interest is piqued precisely by specific questions which don't have answers, rather than the massively upvoted musings of very clever mathematicians. Who are Stackexchange to judge what the MO community deem to be "a representative sample of questions from the site"? (Outliers can be very noticeable, it doesn't mean they should be catered to.)

I'm afraid all I can say at the present time is that the homepage sort is very unlikely to remain as it is, but also very unlikely to return as it was.

Could you confirm that the views of the Mathoverflow community (as expressed on meta, say) will at least be taken into account? As you are probably aware, many users of meta were very worried about MO handing over its autonomy to Stackexchange. Your comment, which explains your motivations but doesn't acknowledge any of the concerns raised in this thread, isn't very reassuring.

Already relatively long ago it was discussed and then decided that it is better the default is off (also, if "we" would not consider it as better it is off it would be on, obviously).

Thus, could the default for redenering titles please be kept as off (and thus changed in the sandbox) after the migration.

(This suggestion assumes there is still the possibilty to have this option, if not, I would consider it as somewhat unfortunate, but will live with it. But if there is still a default to set, I am very strongly in favor of keeping it off; I provide provide detailed arguments on request.)

[To avoid any possibility of a misunderstanding: I am not talking about mathjax-rendering in general (this should be on, IMO), but specifically about the rendering in the titles of questions (when looking at a list of questions). And, to repeat, this is as we have it here all along, while we could easily have differently if we wanted.]

Side note on the front-page, if anybody reading this now wonders what all the talk about wikipedia is or should get happy that something was changed: the top-question used to be Why don't more mathematcians improve Wikipedia but it is now gone yet it seems only since "a month" (since it was asked) has just passed.

(By the way, the current MO-tab month-tab has as "top"-question Mathematicians with unusual education, closed, as duplicate, yet also so annoying somebody even asked a question just to make fun of and to complain about it.)

Sometimes, "serial upvoting reversed" doesn't lead to changes in reputation (e.g., Anton Geraschenko), but sometimes it does (e.g., -30 for Scott Carnahan). What does "serial upvoting reversed" actually mean? Someone serially upvoted, say, Scott, Scott got the increase in rep sometime ago and now the system is taking it back?

On another topic, is anyone else having trouble logging into the dev site with OpenID? When I try, it want to create a new account, despite the fact that I log into MO this way normally. Then it declares that "Oops! Something Bad Happened!" if I go ahead and try that. (Maybe I screwed it up by doing that once and then deleting the newly created account?)

there are many links on main to this meta, at the moment they work in the sandbox-version, but at the moment this meta is also still at its current location (regarding url). It was discussed that it would be important to keep these links operational and this should not be difficult to achieve (various ideas got mentioned). So, the question:

In which way is it planned to achieve that the existing links to meta will remain operational after the transsition?

Community Bulletin

metaMathOverflow has no Site.ChildMeta defined

What are we going to put here?

closed as off topic by Asaf Karagila, David Roberts, Anton Geraschenko♦ 3 mins ago

Questions on Empty are expected to generally relate to , within the scope defined in the faq.

So some text needs to be edited here.

But specifically for what to write for Do and Do not ask this is an interesting question we might want to discuss (though perhaps not in this thread, see my first post in this thread).

According to a thread on meta.SO, which I beleive from other threads to be still current, the "hotness" of a question is computed as

4 (log Qviews) + (Qscore x Qanswers)/5 + Sum (Ascores)

divided by something sort of 'continous' depending on the time asked and last active. And I infer from other threads that the months and week tabs are computed about like this with the time-dependency not being continous but a hard cut-off.

Now, if this is like this the main problem to me are not the views, but that the number of given answers has a considerable influence, once directly via Qanswers then via Sum (Ascores) and also via views.

This will all the time give us the almost exclusisevly opinion based questions that allow too many possible answers and both is discouraged even in the standard (not specific to MO) description question on top, creating ever more answers to them.

Also, if ever for the list as it is now, and basically it will be like this most of the time, this should be a guide for new users what the site is about and what questions can be asked here (which is as I infer from a thread over at the meta.SEs a motivation for this), this is in my opinion a user-guide for potential desaster, the ones will actually ask things like this and in the majority of cases face an unfriendly welcome, and the others leave because they find it not interesting to discuss why mathematicians do not improve wikipedia or the pros and cons of using a smartboard or what research topics are limited to students at top universities, and not to be overly pessimistic, yes, some will still find there way over this self-inflicted obstacle.

In my opinion, for a page like MO, that has very specific audience and really essentially nothing positive to expect form users that just happen to find the site somehow (inside the network or via a general search) and find it somehow fun and interesting this frontpage is completely unsuitable.

A question that would interest me to get an answer to from SE is why StackOverflow does in fact not have this type of frontpage. (Of course, the volume on SO is a lot higher, but it can not only be the volume, in fact it is not so clear how high volume should play a role in a descision here.) I could imagine some reasons they have for this might apply for MO.

"Don't ask about... - Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer"

(although at http://dev.mathoverflow.stackexchange.com/help/avoid-asking one has "If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.")

I don't know if that latter clause should be there. There are many excellent questions which generate long answers which are just brilliant. Also, 'too many possible answers'? What does that even mean?

Also at http://dev.mathoverflow.stackexchange.com/help/avoid-asking there is

"If your question is about the site itself, please don't ask it here. Visit our meta-discussion site, where you can talk about things like what questions are appropriate, what tags should be used, suggest a feature, point out a bug, or generally discuss how this site works."

where the meta link is to meta.stackoverflow - I can see an argument for some site-related discussion going there, but not all. (Ditto the subjective question link - can we come up with our own version of this?)

In SE2.0 recalcs are done automatically whenever posts are removed/unremoved, and also one can activate it by going to the /reputation page (xxx.stackexchange.com/reputation), then scrolling to the bottom and clicking the obvious button.

Added: looking through your answers, it seems you have three such "double" answers. So using the count as there, here you would have 322, further taking into account that two were given after june 18th, so are not yet there, this gives 320.

I'm using Firefox 21.0/Arch Linux 64bit

(Here's the thread)