tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?)

Ryan Budney comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14376)

Ryan Budney — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:41:54 -0700

Nice find, David. It looks like they've done a great job migrating.

David Speyer comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14375)

David Speyer — Mon, 02 May 2011 12:24:36 -0700

It might be interesting to talk to the folks at moms4mom http://meta.moms4mom.com/questions/206/what-changed-when-moms4mom-moved-hosting-providers-on-february-5th-2011 , another SE 1.0 site who has recently moved to OSQA. I imagine they know a lot about how to move between the systems.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14373)

Anton Geraschenko — Mon, 02 May 2011 11:53:08 -0700

@Ben: We were effectively offered the opportunity to migrate a while ago (in response to me bringing up the issue), but only by giving up access to the full database dumps. They're not very receptive to that condition, so in the long term we will probably migrate to another platform.

In the short/medium term, it seems like the best/easiest option is to keep running on SE 1.0, but the longer term is definitely something we're thinking about. In the near future, Scott and I were planning to try to get a copy of OSQA running to get a better feel for how it's evolved since we last looked at it. There are still lots of things that need to be sorted out before there are any big changes, so don't hold your breath yet.

peter.krautzberger comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14358)

peter.krautzberger — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:46:52 -0700

I'd second Andrew Stacey's idea to revisit OSQA (although I'm very fond of MathJax). OSQA seems to have matured significantly over the last year.

A colleague suggested http://kodingen.com, a very interesting young web development platform. I tried to get OSQA to run there, but my time and skills were not sufficient. Maybe somebody else has more luck.

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14355)

Kevin Buzzard — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 12:57:11 -0700

Noah: thanks for the multitude of reasons. "rolling your own" is _always_ the best way to go, if you can be bothered and have the time/energy to write and maintain the software. I have little scripts which do silly things like "monitor a web page to see if it's changed, and if it does then send me an email" which are basically 6 line unix shell scripts, but I have friends who use custom software to do the same thing! I far prefer my way of doing things. On the other hand it would take a huge amount of effort to roll your own mathoverflow, and maintaining it would be much harder than the maintenance I have to do on my 6-line shell scripts...

Ben Webster comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14354)

Ben Webster — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 12:54:07 -0700

Probably I should let Anton handle this, since he knows the details, but my understanding is that we haven't been offered the opportunity to upgrade. Period. The ball is in SE's court, and I don't think they've served it.

Andrew Stacey comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14352)

Andrew Stacey — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:55:31 -0700

What happened to the idea of using OSQA?

(As it's written in python, we could even get decent mathematics support. I've lost count of the number of times that MO and Maths-SX have stalled on me due to MathJaX.)

Noah Snyder comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14351)

Noah Snyder — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:54:10 -0700

Yeah, I think becoming independent is the way to go. However, I also think this should be done by us hiring someone, rather than by Scott working on it. (Because instead he should be writing papers with me!)

grp comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14350)

grp — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:50:32 -0700

I think Kevin should also be reminded of efforts to become independent by "rolling our own" version of the software. The names Scott Morrison and alpha.mathoverflow.net come to mind, but I may have them wrong. A simple search on meta.mathoverflow might turn the right names/discussions up.

Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.04.30

Noah Snyder comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14349)

Noah Snyder — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:43:31 -0700

The main argument against upgrading is that so far we have not been given the option of upgrading in a way that doesn't cede ownership and long-term control of the site to SE Inc. Given the recent behavior of Jeff Atwood over at math.SE, I am not very excited about the possibility of them controlling the site.

Also, keep in mind that SE wants their network to be uniform, so we wouldn't actually be able to change things like the list of reasons to close. We would get all the awesome new goodies that SE2.0 has, but we would not gain any abilities to fix problems in the way that we want them to be fixed. (For example, we wouldn't be allowed to change the closing system to allow votes to stay open.)

Kevin Buzzard comments on "Isn't it about time we upgraded to SE2.0 now?" (14348)

Kevin Buzzard — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:30:19 -0700

I hardly ever use math.stackexchange, but I've used it a couple of times recently, and both times now I've thought "hey, this interface really _is_ better than MO isn't it". In particular the easy editing of comments. People here _still_ ask "can't we implement this great new idea I've had?" and the answer is usually "we can't implement anything at all" or sometimes even "it's been implemented in 2.0 but we don't have 2.0". And people also moan "my question was closed for a reason that I find incomprehensible" to which our answer is "we're stuck with a small finite list of reasons to close and the community now has an understanding of what these reasons mean, which is now a long way from what the phrase actually means". This looks amateurish (to me).

When this was first talked about a year or so ago my initial reaction was "MO works fine, why change?" but now my feelings are "MO works fine except for just some slightly rough bits around the edges which are now beginning to annoy me a bit, so why don't we change?"

Because a year or so ago I could see no reason for upgrading, I never bothered to listen to the other arguments that people had against upgrading. I wonder whether now is a good time for people to remind me what they were, because I have lost sight of them.