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I know it is a little annoying to have to come up with gentle phrasings, but... can we avoid the style of Alexander's comment on http://mathoverflow.net/questions/78407/ammortized-cost-analysis-using-stack-closed? It made me feel out of place...
I doubt you will get any concurrence on following any convention on such messages, especially as most users can post one. However, if you see one or two styles you like, you could copy them with attribution. For more examples, you could check the recent history of accounts that give such good messages, and copy those for later cut and pasting.
Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2011.10.17
Well, my point is that I think we should simply not play the you-are-off-topic-because-we-are-so-special card. If we can agree that it is not a good idea to use it, we can gently convince others... and that does not imply agreeing on a standard message or anything even close to that. Was my initial point not clear? :/
My reading of your initial point was that the example to which you provided a link was less than exemplary in politeness and handling of redirection. While I agree that it is not the style I like to see, my response to your initial point is again that others will do what they will, regardless of what you and I agree upon or whom we can convince. My further response is recommending proactive preemption of such comments by you providing one from your own collection. I have in some of my recent pages a small collection which you can use with attribution, or slightly modify to make them your own. Not that I hold mine up to be shining examples; I encourage you to borrow from other users' examples as well.
If you want to try the route of convincing others, you have my moral support.
Gerhard "But Not My Athletic Support" Paseman, 2011.10.17
Mariano, I am hereby upvoting your two statements.
I agree with Mariano's proposal. We do this on TeX-SX (http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/430/86). The point is not that every user has to use one of these comments. The point is two-fold:
By having these comments, we make it easy to be polite. The polite message always takes longer to type than the impolite one, particularly when one is annoyed at have to wade through a slew of off-topic posts. By providing these templates we make it as easy to be polite as to be impolite (if not easier). If one doesn't have time to compose ones own polite message, one can simply cut-and-paste the stock one and know that it contains the necessary information in a polite way.
By having these comments, we make it clear that one should be polite. Oftentimes we're impolite simply because we don't think. It's hard to be empathetic to User2845. The prominence of this list makes it clear to users that politeness is the expected behaviour.
To counter Gerhard's point, yes others will do as they please. Their behaviour is not my responsibility. But if I get in first with a polite comment - and such a list makes it easier for me to do so - then the overall politeness of the site goes up. Moreover, although others may do as they please, hopefully by example they can be persuaded to be a bit more polite.
I think having standard comments is a great idea, it's way less work for everyone and thus will result in comments being left more often and more quickly, while also being phrased with more thought.
(We could add a
a[href='/faq'] { background: #ff9900; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; }
to the CSS , or even a
a[href='/faq'] { background: #ff9900; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; font-size: xx-large; }
to the CSS of the ask-a-question page, and damn the W3C for banning the BLINK element!)
(There’s text-decoration: blink instead. I never wrote this.)
If we are honest, we will admit that many questions that remain open, and even get upvoted highly, are questions which are not at all research-oriented but which arise from simple (sometimes idle) curiosity. So "questions of interest to professional mathematicians", or the like, is probably closer to the truth.
I wrote recently that the mantra "not research level" as a pretext for closing questions is probably over-applied as it is; we need to bear in mind that a main function of Mathoverflow is to provide a forum for mathematicians to ask questions of one another outside their domain of expertise, which almost always means questions which don't qualify as "research-level" for the experts. (It's annoying when a mathematician of high standing is told by some graduate student that his question might be more suitable for stack exchange; it's as if you can't ask a naive question anymore!)
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