My Google email address is private and is not meant to be disclosed to others, especially not to StackExchange. Furthermore, my user account on MathOverflow already has an email address associated to it, and I don't understand why StackExchange would demand another one from me, especially in such a rude manner.

How do I resolve this problem and log in to MathOverflow without StackExchange invading my privacy?

What is this about, my understanding: As far as I understand, from reading around on relevant metas at SE reminded by the mention of it in a related discussion, in the analog of the MO inbox on SE, the StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™ (in the sequel I will abreviate it as in the title to MultiCollider) seems to contain a feature of giving a list of "hot" questions across the full network. And (possibly) there are other places on the network where this list is also displayed.

If a question for some reason or another happens to make this list, it gains significant visibility and thus likely gets even "hotter" and so will (depending on precise subject) attract contributors from throughout the network. These then can vote and comment (due to association bonus) and might somehow interfere with the 'normal' workings of the site. (This issue already is present sometimes, my worry is it could get a lot worse. In particular, popular question on math.SE often have comments like 'This is so great! I only registered to vote this up.').

Based on my understanding of the situation:

I would like if MO would opt-out of being included in the listings of this MultiCollider (as well as other network-wide listings of "hot" questions).

My (vague) understanding is that there are or were some other sites that are not included in this cross-network promotion of questions, for one reason or another. (So this might be a more feasible wish then not giving any assciation bonus at all for MO, which might be still better.)

ps: This is in more implict form burried in a recent other thread, but I thought not many will have read everything there.

1) Once we migrate to the network, we will move to a network style meta and keep this meta only for historical purposes. However, we will still need a place to discuss decisions that impact the community and do not belong on the meta site, in particular decisions regarding the MathOverflow company separate from the site itself.

What form should this discussion space take?

A simple vanilla site like our current meta would do but there may be better ideas out there. The only requirement is that we should host it ourselves. We could just keep this meta alive for a while but I think it's better to just move on since the discussions already here are mostly off-topic for the new discussion site.

2) We have been thinking about opening volunteer position at MathOverflow to help out with "community relations." I've often heard people say that there should be a moderator blog or something like that but none of the current moderators are very interested in doing that. This has been a problem lately since the moderators actually have a lot more to say than usual because of the migration. The actual duties of this position are not yet well defined, we hope that the community and the volunteer will have a vision for it.

(a) What would be the exact role of this position? (b) Any volunteers for such a position?

• You can use the sandbox to test things out on MO 2.0.

• You can also use our fakesite to test things out on MO 1.0 without disrupting the main site.

In another thread, Emil J pointed out that the "backticks hack" that is frequently used on MO 1.0 will not work on MO 2.0. This problem has already been corrected in the sandbox.

This meta will not suddenly vanish when we roll out MO2.0. We will keep it as a reference and we could keep using it for a some other things. What to use it for and how to link it to the main site are very good questions. Do you want to start a new thread where you and others can pitch ideas?

I proposed that the current meta.MO be renamed discussion.MO and that it be linked at the top of the page as Discussion, right next to the meta, FAQ, chat, and "How To Ask" links.

We've talked about migrating to SE 2.0 a number of times. See
Stack Exchange 2.0, and what this means for MathOverflow.
Some of the changes in SE2.0 are irritating...
Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?
The main obstruction has been the fact that we would lose access to the full database dumps, which would mean that it would be very difficult to change platform if something bad happens to SE Inc (e.g. their interests severely diverge from ours or they are bought by evil company X).

I got the chance to visit SE Inc headquarters a few weeks ago and chat with Joel Spolsky (SE CEO) and other members of the SE team. Joel said they would be willing to set up an "in case of emergency, break glass" mechanism whereby we could get one time access to the full database for purposes of migration. I think we should do it.

some details

There are a number of things that would change if we migrated. Here are some important bits I can think of:

• We'd retain control of the domain name. (this is also obviously important in case we ever need to migrate)
• There would be no ads on MO, with the occasional exception of "in-house" ads for other SE sites. (as I understand it, they're happy never to make any money from academic SE sites)
• Meta would change to an SE-style meta. I don't care for this much ... I think a regular discussion forum has served us better than an SE-style meta would have. But Joel says that there's a lot in the software that assumes there is a meta sibling site. This could be mitigated by the fact that SE sites are now starting to have associated blogs (and have had associated chat rooms for a while), which could serve the necessary discussion role.
• We'd have to work out some mechanism by which we decide that we want to migrate to another platform. I think the easiest option is to require something like a 2/3 majority vote among the moderators. I should stress that I think this is the best/easiest legal mechanism for triggering access to the full dump; of course, any such decision would be accompanied by extensive discussion on meta, as well as additional discussion with people like Ravi. My expectation is that on any major step MO needs to take, we (the MO community as a whole) can reach near unanimous decision after a thoughtful discussion.

Re: social stuff and math.SE

One thing that made people uneasy about migrating is the turbulence on math.SE. I also got a chance to meet with Jeff Atwood in person recently. I came away from it with a better understanding of why things went the way they did. I don't think I can articulate it well, but I'll give it a quick shot. From my chat, I got the impression that the problem was that in the early days of math.SE, the community (and even the moderators) lacked a sense of ownership of the site. In a technical sense, this was justified since they didn't own the site, but the result was a severe us-v-them mentality in some of the community. In this kind of atmosphere, it's easy for things to blow up.

The main point is that I don't think that MO is in danger of having the sort of friction with SE Inc that math.SE had.

I think we on MO should make a list of things that work differently, negative or positive, on SE2.0 (those of us who have used it a bit). This should be considered if and when we are offered a migration deal.

So I'm starting this thread to get an idea of what the technical aspects of this change would be for meta.MO. To be absolutely clear, the underlying assumption of this thread is that MO will migrate to SE, the SE-style meta will exist for things that it is designed for (technical feature requests, bug reports, .... not a lot else), and this site will morph into a "discussion" site (which it really has been all along). Under those assumptions, what would be needed or desirable to keep this site running and keep it a part of the MO scene?

Here's a few things that occur to me (and taken from Anton's comments in the above-linked thread):

1. From the SE side, there would need to be links to this site wherever there are links to the SE-style meta.
2. Some sort of linking of identities.
3. OpenID login.
4. Some ability to "migrate" posts from the SE-meta to this one. At the very least, one should be able to cut-and-paste the source from an SE post and know that it will render correctly here. Would this mean we'd need MathJaX here?

The software that runs this forum is called "Vanilla". It is a PHP forum. It is the same software that runs the nForum and the forum for the Azimuth Project. It is extremely customisable, and I have some experience with customising it.

In particular, we should implement the StackExchange API, running off a database dump. 

What does this give us?

• An easy way to quickly run a read-only version of MO, if something goes badly wrong in our relationship with SE (e.g. someone evil buys them; I'm not really worried about this being necessary with Joel Spolsky at the helm).
• We can leverage the existing community developed software, collected at Stack Apps. In particular, this includes quite nice read-only frontends, that go entirely through the API, and are independent of any backend design choices about how the data is stored. 
• If we ever want to write our own independent interface, it gives us a natural way to partition the task into smaller projects, which can be independently developed, by different participants, in different languages, etc. 
• It gives us a great helping hand overcoming the handicap that mathematicians are bad software developers; the API has quite well defined behaviour, and I think on Stack Apps one can find existing test suites that check the SE implementation of their own API. We would thus be writing to a spec, with an existing body of tests. 

In fact, writing this I realize what we really should be doing!  Hire a real programmer to write something that:

• can import a SE 1.0 dump (full or public, but if public with some limitations below)
• implements the current API (perhaps with some exceptions; there's some stuff that doesn't make sense for a 1.0 dump)
• satisfies some basic performance requirements (my experience writing alpha.mathoverflow.net means I know some of the worst bottlenecks, and I think I could quickly write down what's necessary to avoid them)
• passes all the tests in a conformance suite (which, as above, I hope already exists!) with exceptions when parts of the API don't make sense for our 1.0 database

Discuss, work out how much this should cost, find appropriate grant money (I'm pretty certain I can arrange this), and hire someone. 

I'll be offline next week, but if someone wants to look at the API and Stack Apps and see if what I've said above is sensible, that would be great! (I'm also time constrained and on a phone: if someone wants to provide URLs for these things, please do.)

It's very possible that it will go back offline unexpectedly --- it's kindly hosted on the machine that runs the Knot Atlas, a joint project of mine with Dror Bar-Natan, and if alpha starts misbehaving and clobbering that machine I'll just switch it off again.

It took a few days to get the code to the point that you can see, but it's very far from what we'd eventually need, and I can't do the rest myself. (I need to do some mathematics every so often!) This post is to explain what we have now, and give a very brief tutorial on all the moving pieces.

At some point we actually need to think about whether we want to go down this road in the end. For now, I'd just like to see if there's interest from other members of the community in pushing this further, and to work on it at a low priority. I'm going to ignore all these higher level decisions in this post, and just talk about the technical details.

You can get a local copy of the software using mercurial (tutorial tutorial), by typing

hg clone https://tqft.net/hg/mathoverflow

(There's an alternative copy of this repository at http://code.google.com/p/mathoverflow/source/list, but for now it's not necessarily "the bleeding edge".) This repository also contains various other bits of code that Anton and I use to maintain MathOverflow; everything you need for alpha is in the alpha/ subdirectory.

To compile and run a local copy, you need to have maven (>= version 2.2) installed. To get a local copy running at http://localhost:8080/, type

mvn jetty:run

If you modify the source code and recompile (with mvn compile) the local webserver should automatically restart with your changes. The actual database resides in an SQL server at my web hosting, so even for the local copy you need an internet connection for anything to work.

Alpha itself is written in a modern programming language called scala, and uses the Lift web framework. Unfortunately both of these have pretty steep learning curves, which is going to be a really significant problem for getting people involved! On the other hand, both are pretty fantastic. Scala is essentially "what java could have been": it's statically typed with lots of clever compiler inference, allows imperative style programming but encourages functional programming, and is both concise and expressive. Lift is not your everyday web framework, and web frameworks generally are not something I have any expertise in. I've been very happy to find that implementing fancy tricks via AJAX and Comet (i.e. dynamic web pages) is straightforward and intuitive, and doesn't even involve writing any Javascript by hand (essentially, Lift compiles scala to javascript as needed).

Before we get onto the codebase, there's a issue tracker for alpha. Please feel free to add issues, but for now please restrain yourself -- obviously there's a huge gap between alpha and the real thing. Let's only add issues detailing discrepancies between alpha and the "read-only" aspects of MathOverflow (e.g. don't worry about voting, answering, login, moderating, etc, for now) and even then, don't bother with issues for minor details that look like they'll get fixed in the course of other essential work.

Very briefly:

• Most of the current Stack Exchange sites will be closed down in 3 months time.
• Active ones are guaranteed 12 months of hosting in their present state (i.e. without further software improvements).
• The current Stack Exchange software is currently being merged with the Stack Overflow software (bringing many enhancements, e.g. comment notifications), and they're referring to this merge as "Stack Exchange 2.0".
• New sites can only be created through a community process, described in the blog post above.
• Existing active sites will be able to migrate to the new software, and it seems likely that exceptions to the usual community rules for 2.0 sites will be allowed.

Before anyone gets into a panic, remember that Fog Creek likes us. Anton was asked for his comments on the new system before it was publicly announced: we're in the loop and can expect special treatment.

It seems that if we can get some exceptions to the usual policy, we'll probably be okay. I think for now the two most important things to ask for are:

• Anton remains our benevolent dictator.
• We continue to have access to complete data dumps.

The current proposal for Stack Exchange 2.0 is that everything will be run by committee, and the public will at best have moderator powers (as opposed to Anton's administrator powers). Hopefully Fog Creek will see sense on this (there's plenty of noise to this effect on meta.SE), but hopefully we can grandfather in an exception. Access to complete data dumps (as opposed to the publicly accessible data dumps we've been providing) should obviously be an inviolable requirement, so that we have the option of switching out to different software. The unfortunate thing here is that if we're exceptional in having access to the database dumps, they may not actually do us much good, as the alternatives (Shapado, OSQA) won't have any reason to track changes in the database format over time, when every other Stack Exchange 2.0 site is siloed.