tea.mathoverflow.net - Category Feed (Bug reports)

Automatic tag deletion seems not working

quid — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:59:04 -0700

Possibly this should be in the tag merge/rename requests thread but I am not sure:

I believe the automatic deletion of tags that are not used stopped working a while ago (possibly related to the ongoing event of badges not working).

This is somewhat unfortunate since cetain tags then tend to get used quite a bit, for example combinatorics got already quite a bit (3 in addition to the creation) questions [I retagged them]. Just very recently number-theory got created which experience shows has a similar 'attracting force' for (mis-)tags (as well as some others: prime, numbers, differential,...).

I do not know if the automatic deletion can somehow be 'restarted', which would be optimal. If not, the purpose of this post would be to ask if a moderator could manually delete at least the most 'dangerous' (as regards usage) 'empty' tags in the 'recently created tags' list. Thanks in advance.

Added: since badges just restarted to work, the same might go for auto-deletion. I could not yet observe it but for the moment I am hopeful and thus retact the above made request as it might be obsolete.

Added 2: indeed it works now.

Badges appear broken

karlschwede — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:09:59 -0700

Hi, it seems to me that currently no one is being awarded new badges. This appears to have been going on for about a week. I've noticed it myself, but I've also observed it on others.

For example, I can find many examples of users who have 10 points, because they recently asked a question which has 1 upvote, but do NOT have the badge "Student". For example, see these questions:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/106947/reflexive-besov-spaces

or

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/106922/flatness-of-contravariant-connections

or

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/106796/sufficient-and-concrete-condition-for-a-function-to-satisfy-some-measure-theore

Perhaps this is also something that I just don't understand about how these are being awarded.

Fragments of text disappear when editing

teorth — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:54:32 -0700

Hi, I am encountering a strange bug whenever I try to edit my question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/130988/why-are-schur-multipliers-of-finite-simple-groups-so-small , namely that when I open up an editing window, certain fragments of text disappear. Specifically, the LaTeX fragment ${}^2 A_{n-1}(q^2) = PSU_n({\bf F}_q)$ contracts to ${}^_{n-1}(q^2) = PSU_n({\bf F}_q)$, and later on a $4$ contracts to a $ which then causes LaTeX rendering problems later in the text. I tried the trick of enclosing things in backticks which solved some LaTeX rendering issues but did not solve the disappearing text fragment problem. But as long as I cancel the edit, the question as displayed on MathOverflow does not have the missing text problem, so the problem seems to lie in how a question is received by the editing box rather than how it is actually stored on the site. It's a very strange bug and I don't know what is triggering it; there do not appear to be any particularly dangerous special characters near the two fragments of text that are prone to deletion.

dev.mathoverflow.stackexchange.com "linkwork profile" link

jeq — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 10:24:28 -0800

Possible bug. My page on http://dev.mathoverflow.stackexchange.com/users/16302/jeq seems to have a strange network profile link http://stackexchange.com/users/1111787/tomoki. Perhaps this is just a place-holder?

QUESTION SENT AND RECEIVED NOT ON PROFILE PAGE

jerome — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 05:08:48 -0800

After more than one hour of posting my question and getting and answer and 2 comments , and commenting myself:
QUESTION at : http://mathoverflow.net/questions/121171/which-finite-group-is-not-the-automorphism-group-of-some-rooted-finite-trees
QUESTION ACCESSIBLE only TROUGH : http://mathoverflow.net/search?q=finite+group

I still do not see the question on my profile
PROFILE AT :http://mathoverflow.net/users/3005/jerome-jean-charles

Is it because some validation is needed before appearance in the profile page??

The LaTeX formatting doesn't work

davidac897 — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:48:26 -0800

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/115462/on-the-derived-category-of-constructible-etale-sheaves

I've had this issue in the past - I format LaTeX correctly, yet it doesn't work.

Bug of feature ?

Eremenko — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 19:49:19 -0800

Every time I vote down some question or answer, the system subtracts one point from my own reputation.
Just curious: is it supposed to work this way?
Alex.

mathoverflow is down

rwbarton — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:24:40 -0800

When I go to http://mathoverflow.net/ I see:

Server Error in '/' Application.

http://faketestsite.stackexchange.com/ is unaffected, so I guess this is a Math Overflow-specific problem.

too many Blockquotes hang my Chrome on

Alexander Chervov — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 06:21:11 -0700

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/108406/why-would-dim-primitive-irrep-divide-size-of-some-conjugacy-class

When I try to insert several more lines with "blockquote" in hangs my Chrome on :(
This has repeated 3 times.

How does "search" work with respect to LaTeX code in titles?

Spiro Karigiannis — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 12:36:43 -0700

Hi all,

I tried looking for this in previous discussions, unsuccessfully, so hopefully I am not repeating something well-known. My question is how the search engine in MO handles LaTeX code in titles. Specifically, I was trying to search for any new questions on my favourite topic, the Lie group $G_2$. When I search for 'g2' or 'G_2' or even '$G_2$, I get lots of hits, including, for example:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/97059/is-the-derived-group-of-g-2-simply-connected

which has LaTeX code $G_2$ in the title. But what does *not* come up, is this question:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/49357/g-2-and-geometry/

which also has $G_2$ in the title. I couldn't figure out why. Anyone have any ideas? [Of course, given that my answer to that question is my most useful contribution to MO thus far, it's in my interest for the question to show up properly on searches...] It also makes me wonder if there are other questions I might be interested in finding that aren't showing up for similar reasons...?

Thanks

Spiro

Searching for a tag

Anweshi — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:07:00 -0800

It seems (at least for me) that searching for a particular tag is no longer working. For instance, linear-algebra shows nothing.

The closed question should be dropped immediately

Frank Science — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 23:59:15 -0700

It's closed because it's not valuable in MO, so I think the more important questions should not be masked by the closed questions.

I posted an answer to a closed question

Vladimir Dotsenko — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 05:47:42 -0800

I am not sure if that's a bug or a feature or something else, but I thought I'd report it here. There is this question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/90807/computer-invariant-closed which I originally voted to close since it did not seem to have any mathematical content to it. Then, the OP replied to a Gerry Myerson's comment to the question, and the question suddenly started looking more meaningful, though unacceptable in that form. I however started typing an answer to it, and when I hit the button to post the answer, the most delightful result occured - the question now is marked as closed 17 minutes ago and has an answer posted 8 minutes ago. I don't think it's bad that system allows to post an answer which was being typed before the last vote to close was cast, but it's a little bit unexpected!

Possible 29-02 bug?

Yemon Choi — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:49:34 -0800

Earlier there was a bug over on MSE where people's profiles disappeared behind a 404-esque message. It transpires that was due to a leap year glitch in the code.

The same bug seems to have bitten MO, so I thought I'd flag it here.

I can't see my userpage.

aizenr — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:38:06 -0800

I can't see my user page. I see a cat fixing a TV instead :-(

Thank you,
Rami

Can't access my own user profile

nielkj — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:13:01 -0800

Even though I am officially signed into MO, I cannot access my user profile. I get the error message
"Oops! Something Bad Happened!"

Here's the link to the error:

http://mathoverflow.net/error?aspxerrorpath=/users/8032/john-klein

Please help resolve this.

Math preview does not work

Seva — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:24:37 -0800

For some reason, I don't get math preview when I type in / edit my questions - which is, naturally, a major incovenience.The "preview math" checkbox does not appear either. Can anybody suggest an explanation or recommend anything I can try to fix this? I work with IE under Windows 7, and I have Active Contents Filtering off.

Search issue

SteveLandsburg — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:11:08 -0800

When I search for the term "extensions", the post http://mathoverflow.net/questions/83038/nonequivalent-extensions-with-the-same-terms does not come up. Is there some general pattern here?

Earthquakes centered in Berkeley

Will Jagy — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 15:34:42 -0700

On October 20 we had a 4.0 earthquake centered in Berkeley, then a 3.9 the same day. Today we had a 3.2 about an hour ago. This did not happen before MO.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/FaultMaps/122-38.html

login

Michael Hardy — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:25:31 -0700

I am surprised to find that I am able to log in here, since I am suddenly unable to log in to mathoverflow or stackexchange, and I could not log in to meta on stackexchange. I get this error message:

Unable to log in with your OpenID provider:

failed to authenticate, returning Failed. Please ensure your identifier is correct and try again.

I use google as my OpenID. I have no problem logging in to google itself.

What's going on?

Mathoverflow down momentarily

theojf — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:53:13 -0700

Probably this is something with the Fog Creek hosting. I think MO was unavailable for about 20 seconds this morning.

Typo on the "Ask a Question" page

David Speyer — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:09:27 -0700

The tagging directions say "For more on how to tag you question effectively..." Can we please change that "you" to a "your"?

I can't believe it took me two years to notice this; I will now be unable to stop seeing it.

ca.analysis-and-ode versus ca.classical-analysis

WillieWong — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 06:28:29 -0700

Now that we have changed the tags for classical analysis to (ca.analysis-and-ode), can we also update the Ask Question Page (and other places where a list of "arXiv tags" are presented) to reflect it?

HTML errors on the front page of MathOverflow

Dmitri Pavlov — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:54:51 -0800

I have recently installed a new version of Firefox (3.7a1pre) and noticed that JavaScript doesn't work (I can't upvote an answer, can't star a question etc.).
Of course, this version of Firefox is not stable and the problem might lie within Firefox itself (in which case I should probably submit a bug report to Mozilla),
however, when checking some MathOverflow pages for HTML correctness I discovered that they are full of errors, see for example
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://mathoverflow.net/
Many of these errors seem to involve JavaScript markup (e.g., see Line 1761, Column 168)
and perhaps the incorrect markup is the source of the problem.
Can we fix this?

editing comments

Michael Hardy — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:12:55 -0700

Maybe not strictly a bug, but a feature request. Yet another way in which the software here is inferior to what stackexchange uses is that one cannot edit one's own comments. At stackexchange one can do so within five minutes after saving them.

Spurious RSS activity

dmehkeri — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:18:49 -0700

I am subscribed to various MO tags via RSS and I seem to be getting spurious activity. For instance this:
http://mathoverflow.net/feeds/question/36693
claims activity on July-18-11 4:55 PM -- but looking at the content it hasn't been touched since 2010.

Users page features break within a search

naramsey — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 15:00:00 -0700

This may be a sort of lame bug report as it's quite rarely relevant (and as far as I know could be a browser issue or something), but I thought I'd pass it along.

If I go to the "Users" page on MO and search for a string in the search box, I get the list of users whose username contains that string. If there's more than one page of such users, the numbered list of pages of such users (the one with the "next arrow," etc.) changes to reflect this diminished list. These buttons don't work all for me - they basically don't reflect the search. For example, if I hit "next" is forgets that I've searched and takes me to the second page of the complete list of users.

For what it's worth, I'm using Safari 5.0.5

Icon in FF4 has a grey line on the side

Andrew Stacey — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:45:11 -0700

WIth FF4 (but not FF3.something) then I get a mildly irritating grey line on the side of the MO logo. A quick search turned up this post: http://jnc.ath.cx/wp/?p=45 which says that to fix it, one can add a transparent border of 1 pixel.

Could this be fixed? It's minor, but irritating nonetheless!

Quotes don't seem to work in search

Nate Eldredge — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:38:03 -0700

Using quotes in the MO search feature is apparently supposed to search for a phrase, but it doesn't seem to be any different than omitting the quotes. Searching for "Banach Lebesgue" with quotes returns apparently the same results as searching for Banach Lebesgue, none of which contain the two words together.

2nd page of user page bug.

Ryan Budney — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:28:27 -0700

If I go to a user page on MO, one that has more that one page of asked questions listed, and click on the button for anything other than the 1st page of questions, the page formatting is killed.

Is this just me?

eg: http://mathoverflow.net/api/userquestions.html?page=2&pagesize=10&userId=290&sort=

Tag suggestion box not popping up on Firefox 4

WillieWong — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:53:59 -0700

Just want to check if this is just me:

On Firefox 4 (running over Linux), in the "Ask Question" page or "Edit Question" page, I no longer get the automatic completion suggestions for tags. Presumably it is some sort of Javascript bug in Firefox 4, does anyone know a fix or workaround?

Edit: hum, the tag suggestions work on SE2 sites, also on FakeTestSite, so I am not so sure it is an issue on my end.

Software bug

Michael Hardy — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:50:49 -0700

When you write a comment, you're told how many characters are left. If you exceed the limit, you see a negative number. If you stop when it says "0 character [sic] left", you get an error message saying you've exceeded the limit, and then your whole comment is lost. You cannot go back and edit it further to make it one character shorter.

Tag listing on "ask question" or "edit question" pages

WillieWong — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:06:48 -0700

A list of arXiv tags are provided on the "ask question" and "edit question" pages. But some of them do not correspond to the tags we actually have.

For example, one of the listed suggested tags is "ca.classical-analysis-odes", whereas in reality the one that we have is "ca.classical-analysis".

Can someone with the power fix that list?

Captcha

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:29:33 -0800

What the heck? I just got hit by a captcha request while answering a question. I was logged in as me, a fairly long standing user. This ain't right, is it?

Captchas don't show up

Emil J — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 05:46:28 -0800

A couple of times I've been asked to enter a Captcha when posting on MO. The thing is, it never works properly: there is no actual Captcha to be found anywhere on the page. Here is a screenshot:

I only managed to get the posts through by reloading the original question and retyping the answer, which I suppose proves I'm not a robot indeed, but doesn't seem to be the intended purpose of a Captcha. The browser is Firefox 3.5.5, and if relevant, JavaScript is not disabled for MO, anything else seems to be working on the site.

MathJax error message?

Kevin Lin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 01:13:11 -0700

I keep getting this error message?

MathJax no longer loads a default configuration file; you must specify such files explicitly. This page seems to use the older default config/MathJax.js file, and so needs to be updated. This is explained further at http://www.mathjax.org/help/configuration

Math is sized differently in code tags

Anton Geraschenko — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 17:35:56 -0700

See http://faketestsite.stackexchange.com/questions/159/math-is-smaller-in-code-tags.

I noticed a bit ago that MathJax math looks smaller when you put it in code tags (in chrome; bigger in firefox). This typically comes up when you have a paragraph where you use markdown, but you're trying to keep markdown from sticking its nose into your formulas (e.g. you don't want it turning \\ into \), so you put those formulas in backquotes. In this situation, you want the math in code tags to be the same size as all the other math, but it isn't.

Clearly some bit of css is causing the trouble, but I was unable to track it down. If somebody can tell me what to add to css to fix the discrepancy, I'll add it.

Can't un-star favorites on pages 2 and up

Ilya Grigoriev — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:28:20 -0700

I tried to un-favorite questions by clicking on the little stars on the "favorites" tab of my profile. This works fine on the first page of favorite questions, but stops working on any other pages (it seems that the reloading of questions that happens when you click on page 2 breaks the javascript that reacts to clicking on the stars). I know of no other good way to organize favorites, so this is annoying.

Preview is very slow.

Peter McNamara — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 22:04:24 -0700

For me (firefox 3.6.15 on XP), the live preview of my answer was painfully slow, to the point where it stopped working altogether. I went to faketestsite and the preview worked perfectly, and also looked very different (I could take screenshots if I knew how to place them here).

I do recall that at some point in time a while back, the look of the texed part of this site changed, and simultaneously the load time increased. This may be relevant.

Losing comments

thierryzell — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:57:11 -0800

What's the deal with this dumb software? I leave a comment with zero characters to spare, feel proud of myself as I submit it, and I get a pop-up saying: "Comments limited to 600 characters". Fine, I press "OK", and poof my comment disappears into the aether(-net?). Shouldn't the software allow you to at least edit your comment or something rather than rudely discard it? Will it also drop a 1000-word answer if I ever misread a CAPTCHA? (Yes, I realize that the answer is probably yes, and that saving before posting is my friend. Still... a bit more user-forgiveness wouldn't go amiss...)

Favicon

Mariano — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:42:15 -0800

Did MO have a favicon that's now gone? I can see the lines

in the , but they do not seem to affect anything (using Firefox 3.6.13)

Font sizes on an iPod

Mariano — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:24:37 -0800

Reading MO on my iPod is strange because the font size used for comments is larger than the one used for the actual questions and answers. I have absolutely no idea if this is my or MO... Ideas?

MO RSS feed became M.SE RSS feed?

theojf — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 19:46:58 -0800

Since the early days of MathOverflow, I've subscribed to the RSS feed for all recent activity. Until about 2pm today, I had very little trouble with it. When I checked Google Reader just now, though, it had 30 new questions, all of them from Math.StackExchange.

Unsubscribing from the feed and then resubscribing to the link at the bottom of MO (which at least in Chrome on a Mac brings me to a gibberish page of code, but Google Reader knew what to do) fixed the problem. Maybe I was subscribed to a feed from way back when we were still called Mathematics.StackExchange? In that case, perhaps the explanation is related to the discussion about Mathematics.stackexchange.com redirect.

MO's math stopped rendering

Mariano — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:43:55 -0800

For some reason, as of 5 minutes or so all math on MO has stopped rendering, resulting in the infamous "Math processing error" message.

Clearing the cache does not seem to fix it.

Deleting a comment again

Michael Hardy — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:54:49 -0800

Once again (this time in the thread titled "What is the state of our ignorance about the normality of pi?") I cannot delete a comment. There was a typo in some TeX code, which one cannot preview. I posted again without the typo. Usually one can delete one's comments; sometimes one cannot.

Subpixel hinting disappeared from formulas

Anixx — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 13:58:04 -0800

It seems that subpixel hinting disappeared from formulas. Is this a problem of my system or due to a change in server software?

Russell's paradoxon for MathJax

darijgrinberg — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 05:00:55 -0800

The fun thing: \newcommand{\bla}{\bla} \bla
The bad thing: It works.
(A troll friend of mine used this to kill a chat channel which was running MathJax.)

Question "What is the knot associated to a prime" disappeared

Kelly Davis — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:51:23 -0800

The question that was here...

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/50879/what-is-the-knot-associated-to-a-prime

is no longer. AFAIK, it was not closed. It looks like some DB hiccup.
Ideas as to what happened?

Edit box cuts off my question.

SJR — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 03:25:32 -0800

I entered a question here: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/50548/approximating-polynomials-in-rx-using-integer-valued-polynomials . When I try to edit it, I find that the edit box cuts off everything after Remark 3, i.e., I cannot see or change Remark 4. My browser is Chrome. Is this a problem on my end, or has anyone else run into this?

I cannot delete one of my comments.

Michael Hardy — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:53:06 -0800

Please see the point under http://mathoverflow.net/questions/49989/algorithm-for-k-medians-in-a-convex-polygon where I said "Clearly a software bug". I cannot delete one of my comments.

MO's ssl-certificate is slightly problematic

peter.krautzberger — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:24:00 -0800

Over at the discussion http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/835/possible-troll/ the topic of login-security came up. It is not a big risk I think (see my comment there), but because of it I tried to access MO via https/ssl-encryption for a test -- which showed a slight problem: forcing https lead me to a phishing warning.

It turns out the ssl-certificate for mathoverflow is actually created for stackoverflow. Maybe the SO-overlords can give MO its own certificate?

If I might add, I think it would be great if ssl-encryption was standard (cf. the efforts of https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere ). After all, MO lives and dies with its users, so it would make sense to protect their privacy in this unobtrusive manner (well, if it's not too difficult technically).

Technical problem at MO?

WillieWong — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:44:53 -0800

Starting about half an hour ago, I haven't been able to load "hidden" comments, nor have I been able to commit new comments. I'm still troubleshooting the issue, though I am not sure whether it is on my end or on MO's end (since Deane Yang was able to commit some comments at the same time).

I just opened a Meta thread on whether this question belongs on MO, it'd be nice if someone can add a link to that Meta thread to the original question as I am currently unable to do so. Thanks!

TeX not working

Michael Hardy — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 10:07:52 -0800

I just posted an answer to Richard Stanley's recent question. The "\aleph"s and some other things are not getting rendered, making my answer illegible.

mathematical formulas are not represented

kvphxga — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:24:04 -0800

At first the formulas are written in their primary form (for example $\pi$), but after a while each formula changes to "[Math Processing Error]"
what's the problem and what should I do? My browser is firefox on Windows XP
Thanx!

RSS/Atom feed list problem

Predrag Punosevac — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 22:47:52 -0800

Is it just me or other people have noticed problem with RSS/Atom feed tag on the main MathOverflow web-page? I am using Opera mail as a feeds reader.
My operating system is OpenBSD. I do NOT have any problems with Atom feed on meta.mathoverflow web-page. However RSS crashes the browser.

Thank you for your attention.

A reputation table bug

Andrey Rekalo — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:23:10 -0800

I wonder if something similar has been observed before. As I'm posting this, Andy Putman features simultaneously on pp. 1 and 2 of the reputation table

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/2016/page1i.png

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/4333/page2wh.png

Problem with spacing in questions

Andres Caicedo — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 16:29:23 -0800

Hi. I have no idea whether this is a problem on my end or a bug. In many questions I have noticed that the spacing after a formula is removed, so there is some overlap in the way things display at the end. For example, look at the first line in this question: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/47286/cyclotomic-extensions-with-split-galois-group or of this one: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/21003/polynomial-bijection-from-qxq-to-q (and there are plenty of other examples).

Clicking on a particular Tag sometimes produces almost nothing ?!?!

Spiro Karigiannis — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:06:14 -0700

Hi all,

Has anyone else experienced the following bug? When I click on the TAGS link, and pick one of the tags, sometimes (and seemingly at random times) it will display no questions at all (and sometimes, more bizarrely, just one or two questions.) Then at other random times, clicking on the same tag will show all of the (hundreds) of questions with that tag.

If it helps, I use a Mac with Safari 5.0.2

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/ doesn't make sense

darij — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:20:10 -0800

Try this out: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/rt.representation-theory Empty list. According to the page title, it is probably supposed to show all questions tagged "rt.representation-theory" which have a bounty. But who needs this when there are never more than 10 bounty questions at the same time? I want to be able to view all questions tagged "rt.representation-theory", bounty or not. Options to see only the answered, the answered-with-accept and the unanswered ones would be useful as well.

OpenID login currently broken?

Scott Morrison — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 14:59:02 -0800

I can't log in!

When I enter my OpenID (http://tqft.net/) I just get a message

Unable to log in with your OpenID provider:

Web request to 'http://tqft.net/' failed.

The URL loads fine in my browser, and I can log in other places with the same OpenID. Could someone log out and log back in, and let me know here if they have any problems? I'm confused.

Leaving comments using CDMA technology

Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 09:03:15 -0800

When using a CDMA USB-stick to connect to the internet, I am unable to leave comments on MathOverflow.

If I turn the CDMA off, and connect via Airport (on a Mac) to a wireless network that's probably belonging to a neighbor who has forgotten to password-protect their network, then I can leave comments.

Even using the CDMA, commenting *sometimes* works. Sometimes logging in with a different browser, or different OpenID, or maybe just logging out and back in, seems to help. But usually switching to Airport is the only way.

It may not be relevant but here is a sample URL that is loaded when I try to post a comment and it doesn't work:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/38191/convergence-of-a-markov-matrix/38194?comment=I+would+just+as+well+delete+this+answer%2C+but+I+can%27t+since+it%27s+accepted.#38194

Preview of Number.period

zhoraster — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:28:52 -0800

The picture is self-explanatory.

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_iFCdp50WkYM/TNvEuy8GjTI/AAAAAAAABws/JDWgnmTxTFM/mopreview.jpg

It's only when I put a point after a number, and the same story happens with 3., 4., ..., 99., ...

I think one of my answers was deleted

Steven Gubkin — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 05:32:59 -0800

I thought I had a response to

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/8846/proofs-without-words

Which shows why the derivative of sine is cosine. I looked today and I do not see it.

Name user search 2nd page doesn't work

peterwshor — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:37:45 -0800

Suppose I was looking for myself, but forgot my last name. I go to users and type "Peter" in the search box. I get a whole page full of users, but at the lower righthand corner there are buttons that say 1, 2, next. Unfortunately, the 2 button and the next button don't take me to the second page of "Peter" search results, but the second page of the list of all the users.

Question not appearing in tag category

Carl Mummert — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 13:27:19 -0700

I noticed that this question ( http://mathoverflow.net/questions/41143/statements-that-require-the-existence-of-non-standard-models-to-hold ) does not seem to appear when I view the questions in the lo.logic tag ( http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged?tagnames=lo.logic ). The question is several hours old, and I'm not sure why it isn't showing up.

Name User Search

Bugs Bunny — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 03:41:02 -0700

I don't think it is working properly. I could not find a user and then tried myself. I could not find mysefl either...

By search I mean clicking USERS and the going into TYPE TO FIND USERS...

slowness (especially typing comments) on some machines

Ben Webster — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:07:32 -0800

On my office computer (running Firefox on Fedora), typing comments is painfully, painfully slow; as in, I type the letters, and they very gradually show up. Is there any good explanation for this?

Bug in the rendering of web addresses

pdehaye — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 02:13:13 -0700

I was just filling in my profile at
http://mathoverflow.net/users/8739/paul-olivier-dehaye
which made me realize there was a bug in the rendering of web addresses there (and maybe elsewhere).

The real http address of my homepage is http://www.math.ethz.ch/~pdehaye/
the link http://math.ethz.ch/~pdehaye/ will not work.

On my profile, despite entering the correct link, this gets displayed as math.ethz.ch/~pdehaye . I think this is wrong or at best misleading, and that it should display www.math.ethz.ch/~pdehaye instead. Note that the link actually works when clicked.

Am unable to post since last few days

vagabond — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 01:23:57 -0700

The problem started a few weeks back and has incrementally gone from bad to worse.

Initially I wont be able to post new comments ... then I was unable to edit my own posts ... now I cant even post !!

I have tried using different browser but nothing seems to work.

Can any one help or suggest what I should do.

Thanking you

Vagabond

Removing Favorites

bbischof — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:20:17 -0700

I recently tried to remove some of my favorites by going to the favorites tab and clicking the little stars to making them become un-highlighted. After refreshing the page, they are back to being favorites. I have tried a few times, to no avail to remove these favorites.

No offense to the original questions, but I just have too many favs, hehe.

Enormous Bounding Box for Title

Cam McLeman — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:13:03 -0700

In this question:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/38818/what-is-lim-in-m

The bounding box for the link encoding the title in the top left is so large that I can't click on the mathoverflow logo to get back to the main page.

Can't erase my own comments

Ryan Budney — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 11:20:11 -0700

Hi,

I tend to like to use MO as a mechanism to wake my brain up in the morning, to start thinking about some mathematics. The problem with that is I make mistakes. MO usually is quite cooperative, allowing me to edit my answers, and re-post comments (erasing my old buggy ones as I do).

But this morning it isn't cooperating. It seems to only be happening in this one thread:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/38378/exotic-spheres-detected-in-higher-homotopy

Usually there's a little "x" that appears in the top-right of a my comments, allowing me to delete them. But it appears something odd is happening to the formatting, and it forces the "x" too far off the right, where it is overwritten by the "Related" info box.

If a moderator reads this, my last three comments are all essentially the same thing, but the 1st two iterations were buggy and I'd like to delete them.

inconsistency in faq page

Kaestur Hakarl — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:56:10 -0700

The section of the faq discussing open problems can be linked to directly: http://mathoverflow.net/faq#openproblems

However, no such link exists in the list of questions at the top of the page. To get this URL currently requires one to look into the source and apply some basic HTML knowledge.

Please change the formatting if the "open problems" section is meant to be part of the "what kind of questions not to ask" section, or add a more convenient way to find the direct URL if it is meant to be a 'full' question.

Editing an answer duplicates it instead

djordan — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:32:56 -0700

Hi, occasionally in recent posts, I edited a post I had made to fix some small typo or add a sentence of explanation. When I entered the change, it made a duplicate of the answer, instead of amending the original. This seems to have started happening only within the last week (though I don't post all that often).

thanks,
-david

PS - I browsed to see if this had been reported elsewhere. Sorry if it has, and this is itself a duplicate =].

Error Page

Cam McLeman — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:52:29 -0700

Apologies if this is a well-known issue -- I'm not up-to-date on bug reports.

I got the following error (after being redirected to http://mathoverflow.net/error?aspxerrorpath=/) trying to visit MO, and thought someone might like to know about it.

In any case, I hit reload and everything was fine.
***********************************************

Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".

Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.

"Tagged questions" view empty

Yaroslav Bulatov — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:04:37 -0700

When I sign in, and view the following page it's empty at says "0 questions tagged"
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/co.combinatorics

However, if I load the same page from another browser when I'm not signed in, it's full of questions and says "582 questions tagged"

Answer to a closed question

VP — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:39:03 -0700

This question had a strange history:

Closed at 02:21:43Z UTC

Answer posted at 03:32:54Z UTC

How is this possible?

Hidden user

VP — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:43:10 -0700

I was looking for the answer to a question whose title I forgot. Since I knew who gave it (Allen Hatcher), what could have been easier: just go to his user page and it's linked from there, right? Wrong! Typing either his first or last name in user tab search didn't yield anything. Similarly, I couldn't find him in the list of users sorted by the reputation. For a few minutes I thought that he quit MO for some reason and deleted his account, which was a very disconcerting thought. Fortunately, a search of another question that I remembered him answering led me to his user page. So with some effort that involved memory search (more efficient than the questions search!), I got what I needed. However, I am mystified as to why the user name search didn't work. Is this a bug or an undocumented feature of the system? I recall other instances of likewise not being able to find a user whom I had seen previously.

Doubled markdown bar

Andrea — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:24:37 -0700

In the box Your answer which appears at the bottom of every thread, I often (but not always) see the markdown bar (the one with the hyperlink button and so on) twice.

This happens on Firefox 3.6.8 on Ubuntu 9.10. Do any other people here experience the same problem?

Mysterious front page appearance

VP — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:15:52 -0700

Does anyone have an idea how this question got to the front page? I can't find any record of changes by the user whose name is listed at the bottom right corner of the front page listing, either in the question/answers or at his user page.

I should probably clarify that this is more an expression of puzzlement: it's an interesting question that I haven't seen before and enjoyed reading over.

Bug: revision diffs don't show emphasis changes

Bill Dubuque — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:08:15 -0700

While reviewing my revisions to an old post I noticed that the diff fails to highlight a change in emphasis that I made (which, in fact, was the primary reason that I made the revision). Namely, notice that in version 2 in [1], in the last sentence of my post, I emphasized the word "highly" in the phrase "highly recommend". But the diff does not show this change (no change markup). Obviously this is of little consequence in this instance since it's my own change. But it wouldn't be so innocuous if the change was made by another user. So I thought it worth mention that such changes might easily go unnoticed. Is this a known bug? Are there other known problems with revision diffs?

[1] http://mathoverflow.net/revisions/31457/list

Apostrophes and HTML escapes

WillieWong — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 06:27:15 -0700

I did a quick search on the meta board and didn't find anything to this effect, so I hope this isn't a dupe.

Quite often I see posts to links to Wikipedia in answers. For example, http://mathoverflow.net/questions/31354/theorems-in-euclidean-geometry-with-attractive-proofs-using-more-advanced-methods/31403#31403 And in the grand mathematical tradition of naming things after people, often there are apostrophes or whatnots in the links. And that sometimes isn't a problem. But sometimes, as in the link above, the apostrophe gets "doubly sanitized". Perhaps once from the Original Poster's browser (which sent %27 instead of '), and then once from MO's software (which converted the % in %27 into %25) and thus mangling the link.

Question 1: I sincerely hope that MO is not doubly sanitizing the links itself. In fact I think that cannot possibly be the case as evident by the links that do work. But it'd be nice if someone can confirm that.

Question 2: Is there anyway for the software to be intelligent about this sanitzing so already escaped characters do not get escaped once again?

Question 3: If we cannot do it ourselves, is this something that should be reported to SO?

Reputation fluctuation

VP — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:05:50 -0700

It appears that between yesterday and today, 298 points inexplicably have disappeared from my "reputation" (gained 15, for a combined loss of 283). I can't seem to glean much from various account tools (recent activity, graph, etc). Has anyone else experienced similar phenomenon or knows an explanation?

per-question CSS no longer working

rwbarton — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:47:13 -0700

Apologies if I have missed something by being out of the loop, but I just noticed that my question listings no longer feature highlighting of questions with my "interesting tags". Similarly, the "Hide Ignored Tags" checkbox is not working for me. I tried unchecking and checking that box, and also deleting and recreating my ignored tag, to no avail. Am I the only one having this problem?

Tags on user pages

Robin Chapman — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:04:01 -0700

Maybe this has been commented on before, but the list of tags on each user page
only displays a maximum of 50, and there seems no way of seeing the others.
Is is possible to fix this somehow?

rendering problem with moderator list in faq

Carl Mummert — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 07:53:54 -0700

I am having problems reading the list of moderators in the faq, in both Google Chrome and Firefox. Here's an image showing screenshots of what I see: http://users.marshall.edu/~mummertc/mobug2.png

This is on the most recent version of Ubuntu Linux (10.04) using what I believe are the current versions of the browsers.

Rep recount for Jose

Andrew Stacey — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:45:26 -0700

Pleased as I am to get back onto the second column of the rep count, there's a mismatch between José Figueroa-O'Farrill's reported rep (7992) and the reputation on his reputation graph (over 8000).

Roaming problems

Regenbogen — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:36:55 -0700

Consider a situation in which you access MO from various locations. For instance, you use MO on your mobile and you are on the road.

Then when you move to a different location, your IP changes. And then all goes havoc with the MO page. You get logged out, you see the annoying "first time here? check out the FAQ" banner page(annoying because I am not a first timer) and all that. And logging in using the mobile is harder than with a PC keyboard.

The issue is with MO. Google, yahoo, myopenid, all that has no problem with roaming. Even if the IP changes, the cookies track you carefully.

The same happens if you access MO through a proxy. Or if you have a dialup connection and your IP changes the second time. Of if your internet connection is mobile, and you are given a dynamic IP address. You are forced to login again and the unnecessary banner message appears. It should be enough to have the cookies and your session should be preserved even if you change your IP.

Is it possible to fix this problem?

tag suggestions wasn't working

Andrew Stacey — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:28:35 -0700

I just asked a question and the auto-fill method on the tag suggestions wasn't working.

(As I write this, it occurs to me that I am currently masquerading as a Internet Explorer user for tax reasons so perhaps the javascript was trying to be too clever. If it's working for everyone else, just ignore me and I might go away.)

Links work until the math is rendered

Douglas Zare — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:52:53 -0700

The links in this question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22324/what-information-do-the-roots-of-the-generating-function-of-the-nontrivial-zeroes didn't work for me, so I edited the question and changed the html style links to the [][1] syntax. While I was editing the question, the preview did not work on the math, but I could click through the links I made. However, after the changes, I still can't click through the links except while the math is being rendered. If I reload the page, I have about 1 second to click the links.

I think the problem might be related to a long sequence of latex with no spaces. I see odd behavior in the preview when I break this up using spaces.

I'm using Chrome.

Why did this little square figure next to my (no) name change its shape?

Unknown G. — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 13:50:53 -0700

I really got used to the old one:(

Oh, I did make one change: I replaced the email address for notification of answers. But I'm still using the same account for my OpenID.

Can this be fixed?

Thanks in advance!

Can not make comments

Hailong Dao — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:39:36 -0700

I have been trying to make a comment to respond to a comment here. But after I hit the "Add comment" button, nothing happens. I have tried 4 times without success. Does anyone know what happened? (I was worried that all 4 almost identical ones would appear at the same time tonight).

Dashes in links in comments

Kevin Lin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:20:23 -0700

They get messed up.

Questions being editted by "Math Overflow"

MatthewDaws — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:24:57 -0700

Some questions seem to float up the main list at regular intervals, despite there seeming to be no actual activity on them. They often seem to be associated with (an automatic??) user of the name "Math Overflow".

For example:
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/946/operator-valued-weights
This doesn't seem to have had any activity since last year, but it's again on the main screen today.

Apologies if this has been asked before...

Why is MO slow in 744 Evans hall?

Anton Geraschenko — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:06:03 -0800

I'm pretty sure this is the same bug that Ben Webster reported earlier. I was hoping somebody might be able to help figure out what's going on.

In the computer lab in 744 Evans (at Berkeley), individual question pages are painfully slow, especially with scrolling and inputing any text (answers or comments). The home page is perfectly responsive when I scroll through it (well, maybe not perfectly responsive, but pretty good). Entering text is perfectly responsive on the "ask a question" page and when editing an answer. The question pages on meta.SE are perfectly responsive. (Edit: scrolling and typing answers is responsive on meta.SE, but typing comments is painful)

I thought the problem might be that MO loads a bit of extra javascript in the footer, so I tried disabling javascript, but it didn't help. In fact, it made the MO home page and meta.SE slow. The ask page was still responsive.

Any ideas for what's going on or how we might be able to fix it?

The edit to jsMath so it still worked when we refreshed comments is broken

Harry Gindi — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:55:06 -0700

This must have happened after some upgrade. If you you click "add/show...." the jsMath stuff no longer renders in the new comments.

Simultaneous editing

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:16:56 -0700

This question was edited both by Steve Huntsman and me. To me, it looked like he had edited my edit and made it worse, almost an act of vandalism. So I left a seminasty comment about it. But later, it has occurred to me that we were probably editing the question at the same time, and my edit just happened to arrive first. (And so Steve is blameless after all.)

Is there no locking mechanism, or at least a way to warn a user that someone else edited the page? Or perhaps there is such a way, but subject to a race condition?

jsMath complaint

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:03:59 -0700

Every once in a while, Firefox pops up a monologue box with this text:

The page at http://latex.mathoverflow.net says:

jsMath can't load one of its required components, because jsMath was not obtained from a server that is in the same domain as the page that loaded it.

The most reliable way to trigger it seems to be as follows: Click on the link to a question with quite a bit of LaTeX in the question and/or the answers. Hit the back button while it's in the process of rendering the math. The monologue pops up, not every time but quite often.

I suspect a firefox bug rather than a jsMath bug, but it is a little bothersome once in a while. Any idea why it happens, and if there might be a way to stop it from happening? (Other than browsing more slowly, of course.)

This should not happen

Mariano — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:50:19 -0800

For silly reasons I ended up finding this slightly worrying bug in the code for this discussion site... Click on the textarea below: a javascript alert box should pop up. I have not tried, but this seems like a possible way to have code executed in people's browsers...

This is some random text </p> <hr /> <h2>Anton Geraschenko</h2> <p>Also, it appears that this keeps the input field from appearing (so I can only leave a comment by editing this entry). Also, all this text doesn't appear once I save this edit. This should definitely not happen.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Vanishing comments</h1> <p>HJRW — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:11:11 -0800</p> <p>I've now tried to comment twice on this question: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/17157/which-finitely-presented-groups-can-be-distinguished-by-decidable-properties .</p> <p>Both times, my comment vanished immediately. What's going on?</p> </article> </main></body></html>