tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Question being bumped to the front page)

drbobmeister1 comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11294)

2010-12-05T13:30:51-08:00

Yoiks! Did it again! Answering the question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/48329/how-do-i-analyze-a-sum-of-decaying-exponentials/48340#48340 I accidentally hit "Save" instead of "Preview"! Fortunately
the accidental "bump" only happened once this time, and only lasted an hour. Careful with those buttons, Dr. Bob . . .

Harald Hanche-Olsen comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11116)

2010-11-28T13:34:19-08:00

@Anton: Oh, those radio buttons below the input field? I looked at them ages ago and dismissed them as irrelevant, the default being what I want anyhow. So I don't see them anymore. Reminds me of that famous experiment with the ball players and the gorilla suit.

ghj comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11115)

2010-11-28T12:50:47-08:00

This problem may have become more common in the internet era when there are things like HTML, blogs, and wikis (including the MO software), that ignore line breaks and therefore people get used to that way of doing things, but text editors (e.g. Windows Notepad) and other software (such as this meta site) preserve line breaks.

ghj comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11114)

2010-11-28T12:41:40-08:00

Weird looking line breaks is a common problem when writing text on a computer.

You've already figured out what's causing it: "I insert linebreaks where I think they are needed".

Inserting line breaks in software that wraps text to the screen but respects line breaks will always look jagged like that if you make the window size smaller than your line breaks.

The solution is to check what kind of software is being used by resizing the window to be smaller than your preferred line length. If the jaggedness happens then you know not to use line breaks with this software.

This sort of problem can occur when emailing someone - you don't know what software or what screen size they are using, so inserting line breaks may looked jagged on their email system. On the other hand maybe they are using a really weird email system that doesn't word wrap in which case not using line breaks will put the whole email on one line that needs scrolling, but I don't know how common it is for email programs not to word wrap. I'd avoid using line breaks in emails unless the line lengths are really short and so likely to be ok on any likely system.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11113)

2010-11-28T11:32:54-08:00

@drbobmeister1: an easy solution is simply format as "Markdown". I've just changed the formatting on your posts to Markdown.

Regarding a faux-MO interface. I think it shouldn't in principle be too hard to put one together since the preview is already basically a faux-MO interface. In other words, the preview is rendered entirely by your browser. The problem is that it's not possible to get MathJax to work locally without running a local web server. Perhaps this will change in the future.

drbobmeister1 comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11112)

2010-11-28T11:11:39-08:00

I don't know why this is happening either; I'm using a rather old IBM Thinkpad laptop running XP, and using the most current version of Mozilla Firefox. As I recall, all my comments were formatted as text; they look fine to me as does the stuff on MO. The laptop has a pretty wide screen--not sure how wide exactly; don't have a ruler handy; the browser window fills most of the screen. I insert linebreaks where I think they are needed, i.e. when a line gets long enough for my taste. Sometimes the text wraps before I hit "Enter", so I may not be perfectly consistent in my insertion of breaks. Any further suggestions would be helpful; could this be happening on the receiving end? One final point which may help: the comments were composed online.

BTW, I just tried narrowing my browser window and sure enough, the text got very raggy looking. It seems the browser is inserting breaks to accommodate the window size, while leaving in those inserted by hitting "Enter". Comments/suggestions, anyone?

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11109)

2010-11-28T08:44:31-08:00

There aren't any spaces before the linebreaks. When you compose a comment, you can format it as "Text" or "Markdown" (look just above the "Add your comments" button). If you use "Text", it respects linebreaks.

Harald Hanche-Olsen comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11107)

2010-11-28T06:36:16-08:00

Well yes, but with two spaces before each linebreak?

Todd Trimble comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11105)

2010-11-28T04:59:43-08:00

I doubt it was the browser. My guess is that the comment is being composed elsewhere (where linebreaks are being inserted by hand) and then copied and pasted over.

Harald Hanche-Olsen comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11104)

2010-11-28T01:45:38-08:00

Hmm. The browser would have to add two spaces and a newline, I think, for markdown to insert those
tags. What browser does that?

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11099)

2010-11-27T19:42:14-08:00

@drbobmeister: they look like this on my screen, and probably on Gerry Myerson's as well:

My guess is that your browser is adding linewraps where they don't belong and you don't notice because your screen is wider than ours.

drbobmeister1 comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11098)

2010-11-27T18:49:21-08:00

@Gerry Myerson: exactly what do you mean by "weird", and to what posts do you refer?

Gerry Myerson comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11097)

2010-11-27T16:54:15-08:00

drbobmeister1, why are the linewraps on your posts here so weird?

drbobmeister1 comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11092)

2010-11-26T23:07:37-08:00

Actually, I had been using cut and paste to shuttle the answer-in-progress back and forth between a text file and MO's answer box for the purpose of previewing before this little episode transpired, and continue to do so; that technology works fine for me. My problems started when I accidentally hit post instead of preview. I sort of freaked out for a moment there, but then I noticed that both edit and delete buttons appeared after the post had been made. I was able to delete the unfinished post to my great relief, and was then pleased to see I could edit and save it all online. I obviously didn't anticipate that saving edits from an as-yet deleted post would bump the question to the top of the stack with attribution to the editor of the deleted answer, but without posting the edits themselves. Frankly, it seems to me that the control flow of the interface for the post-delete-edit-save functions was not subject to a complete walk-through by the programmers; its hard for me to imagine the sequencing of events to have been specified as such. Nor am I trying to harsh on the coders; creating software can be time-consuming and complicated, and temporal resources are often limited. For the record, the MO system is fine with me.

To address Anton Gerashenko's question in re. the relative merits of a "faux-MO interface" vs. what currently exists, such a feature would allow MO-style editing if a user happened to be away from internet access, would allow composition to be conducted without exposure to the latency of the net, and might even unload the MO servers and database a bit. But I don't get the impression these are major issues at the present time. In any event, the resources mentioned in Andrew Stacey's comment seem more than adequate for a reasonably experienced coder to cobble something up for private use.

Now, back to work on my encyclopediaic post, with (hopefully) only one more saved edit.

peterwshor comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11033)

2010-11-24T06:55:51-08:00

You don't need to do anything fancy to edit without bumping the question. You can just compose your answer in the MO answer box, preview it, and then cut-and-paste it to a file on your laptop to save. If you don't save it on MO, it won't bump the question. Then, when you're ready to continue editing, just copy-and-paste back to the MO answer box. Repeat until you're satisfied. Even the most technophobic users should be able to do this.

Mariano comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11032)

2010-11-24T06:54:43-08:00

Whatever is autosaved in SE2.0 gets removed as soon as you start editing an answer for another question. While it does protect you against your browser crashing, for example, it is not that more useful.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11031)

2010-11-24T03:02:05-08:00

Learn something new every day! Didn't know about that "save" feature on SE2.0.

It is certainly possible to get a local version of Markdown and do an "edit-compile" route with that. Although Markdown isn't an ISO standard, the variations are not so large. So you can get:

Perl: at Daring Fireball and from Fletcher Penney
PHP: from Michelf
Ruby: from Maruku

and probably many, many more.

Of those, I would recommend using the Perl one from Daring Fireball. That's the original and so the one that most others are compatible with. The others have variously been extended and built out so something that works with one isn't guaranteed to work with another.

I do something like this when working on nLab pages: I have Emacs configured to run maruku on the document instead of latex and to view the result in firefox instead of xpdf. The only bit that would need changing for MO is to work out how to run mathjax on a local page (since the nlab - and also maruku - uses the vastly superior MathML, no additional scripts are needed to view the pages).

WillieWong comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11029)

2010-11-24T02:49:51-08:00

For those of you who have not wondered onto the new SE2.0 sites: I believe there is some sort of auto-saving feature for un-submitted edits in that new version of SE software. There isn't a "save" button, but sometimes when I go back to questions I have looked at and started answering before realizing their subtlety, I am visited by the unborn ghost of answers past. It is quite spooky, in fact.

@Anton: I think drbobmeister wants to do his edit off-line, before copying the whole source into the answer text box? The MO text fields are based on MarkDown. Depending on the operating system, there are some downloadable applications allowing you to do this kind of previews. A place to start searching maybe MarkDown project page or MultiMarkDown project page.

(Side remark: I remember seeing Jim Colliander with a really nice set-up on his Mac. He takes notes in it which can be exported as PDF or directly pasted into WordPress for live-blogging. I know he uses a MultiMarkDown bundle, but I don't know what text editor he used with it.)

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11024)

2010-11-23T19:19:17-08:00

@drbobmeister1: since you've been alerted to the problem, I've unlocked the post now.

An "edit and save" feature would be kinda cool, but it's not in the cards for us in the near future (we don't have the code, and the software is currently frozen). However, you can simply save your draft in a text file. Could you explain how a downloadable faux-MO interface would be better than the preview that is already provided when you edit a post? For long posts, you probably want to disable automatic math rendering, but then you can still preview your post without posting by clicking the "one-shot preview" button. I realize you still have to copy and paste to and from your draft file while you're working on your post, but otherwise this approach works pretty well for me.

drbobmeister1 comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11023)

2010-11-23T19:10:39-08:00

In response to Qiaochu Yuan's post, I have added contact information to my profile.

drbobmeister1 comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11018)

2010-11-23T15:59:52-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen of MO:

Andrew Stacey was pretty close to the mark. I accidentally posted my answer before it was completed; then, as further comments rolled in, my answer started growing; I have been working on the answer on and off for awhile now. It was not my intention to have the question continually appear , to quote Willie Wong, "on the limited real estate of the front page"; in fact, I would much prefer that it hadn't. (I only noticed this myself relatively recently in its edit history.) I had assumed that, until posted, my comments would have little effect other than to be entered into and stored in the database. I was, as Ben Webster put it, "trying to save a half-written answer". Andrew Stacey also suggested composing the "ouvre off-line and post[ing] it when complete". This too I would prefer, but my laptop is bit of an antique and I haven't quite figured out how to install the necessary typesetting SW locally. I'm thinking if I could obtain MathJax and/or js.math I might be to rig something up, though I would apparently need an HTML form similar to what MO has to make the whole package run smoothly. Any suggestions along these lines would be appreciated. I'm a little surprised that there isn't an "edit and save" feature which allows online editing without any indication to the outside world. It might also be cool if the programmers could provide a downloadable web page which could run the parsers locally in MO format; this would provide a very smooth editing interface.

As for Qiaochu Yuan's comment on contact information, I'll check my profile and get back to this discussion. Meanwhile, I can be reached at drbobmeister@gmail.com.

Scott Morrison comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (11003)

2010-11-23T09:18:38-08:00

Fixed; I've locked the post, and left a comment that hopefully drbobmeister will see, explaining what's going on. As usual, 10k users can see the results for themselves, while anyone else sufficiently concerned can enquire via email.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10999)

2010-11-23T05:49:01-08:00

Looking at the edit history, I suspect that drbobmeister ("Can we fix it?") is trying to perfect his/her entry. If you look at the comments that Bob[1] leaves, you'll see that there is an epic story being written. I shall forebear from commenting on the content as it is deleted ...

In particular, it seems that Bob deleted his/her answer because it was accidentally posted before it was finished.

[1] Blackadder fans will recognise the fact that this is insufficient to specify gender.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10998)

2010-11-23T05:36:47-08:00

This is what happens when users don't leave contact information on their profiles...

It is vaguely possible that drbobmeister does not realize his answer is deleted.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10992)

2010-11-23T03:28:10-08:00

Intriguing. There appears to be nothing that Joe User can do about this. It needs a moderator to lock the post. I can't even flag it for moderator attention!

So view this as a (public) flag for moderator attention. I recommend that this post be locked and that a (polite) message be sent to the user explaining what is wrong with what he or she is doing, and recommending that he or she compose their oeuvre off-line and post it when it is complete.

WillieWong comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10991)

2010-11-23T03:04:13-08:00

Just to bring the original topic back up: the question I linked in the original post has been bumped by drbobmeister at least once per day for the past three days. It is getting annoying to see the question bumped up to the front page with absolutely no visible change to the content, and becoming mere noise pushing other potentially interesting problems off the limited real-estate on the front page. Is there anything we can do about it?

Ben Webster comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10926)

2010-11-21T15:56:26-08:00

Peter-

I wouldn't worry too much about this; it's mostly a matter of intent. If you really want to bump your question to the front page, you should think of something real to add to it, or at least be willing to accept the step toward community wiki. If you're just trying to save a half-written answer, I don't think anyone could take much issue.

Harry Gindi comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10884)

2010-11-20T15:13:38-08:00

Dear Peter,

There nothing wrong with doing that. I think that Andres is taking issue with doing that on your own questions. I'm less convinced that there's anythign wrong with it if it's used sparingly (mainly because I've done it once or twice in my time here on MO).

peterwshor comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10880)

2010-11-20T13:53:25-08:00

So deleting your answer while you're editing it until you think it's ready for public consumption has unintended consequences. I've done that (only once, I think, and for no more than a couple of hours). There isn't any other good way to save half-entered answers, though.

Andres Caicedo comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10879)

2010-11-20T08:04:22-08:00

I thought of this a while ago as an obvious way of bumping questions without risking turning them into CW. It seemed silly to me and perhaps not kosher; when this possibility was not even mentioned in a recent thread (http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/780/mathoverflow-user/) I figured the not kosher part was being made clear.

WillieWong comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10878)

2010-11-20T04:30:50-08:00

Ah, I see. I hadn't thought of that. Thanks Qiaochu.

Qiaochu Yuan comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10877)

2010-11-20T04:06:31-08:00

drbobmister wrote and deleted an answer 16 hours ago, and edited his deleted answer 3 hours ago. This is, to my knowledge, the only way a user can bump a question without the evidence being visible to people under 10k reputation.

WillieWong comments on "Question being bumped to the front page" (10876)

2010-11-20T03:58:12-08:00

This question which was originally asked a week ago has been stuck on the front page of almost an entire day. Every time I open the MO front page I see this question "bumped" recently by drbobmeister, yet I don't see any recent edits at all by this user.

Is this a bug of some sort?