@Gerhard: What do you want to ask? I could do it for you.

Here is the remainder. Once again, thanks Harry.

----Begin Part II

Hi Gerhard,


The network policy is, no signatures please, for the reasons defined in the /faq on every site -- http://math.stackexchange.com/faq


Can I use a signature or tagline?
Please don't use signatures or taglines in your posts. Every post you make is already "signed" with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you — fill it with interesting information about your interests, links to cool stuff you've worked on, or whatever else you like!
You can and definitely should open this as a question on http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/ to see if the moderators agree. It is theoretically up to THAT community to decide what they want and don't want. But, if they allow an exception for you, they must allow an exception for everyone... and that to me is the crux of the issue.


I personally think it's a bad idea to allow exceptions on signatures, since the overall increase in noise is damaging to the community in a very "broken windows" way.


But as I said, it is not for me to decide.. this is something for you in the math community to hash out yourselves as "state's rights" override the "national rules" in general.


Jeff

-----End Correspondence

Regarding the issue of signatures, I understand the point about having excess bytes that may be considered noise by others. If the bytes served no purpose to me, I would agree. And if the tag served the purposes that I wanted, I would use the tag instead. The tag does not serve the purposes I want, the signature does, and the demonstrated (to me) negative impact of the signature is zero. I suggest the signature policy be modified so that signatures of small footprint are allowed. Mine takes up less than 60 bytes; how many bytes/pixels does the tag take up? There is also the indexing issue, which the tag does not properly address.

Regarding the user interface, I ask for help: where is the delete button for a user to delete his own answer?

I am also disappointed that the answers were edited to remove my signature AFTER I invited discussion and before I received a reply regarding the discussion. I am willing to overlook this as unfortunate timing if a proper response to this question is made.

Finally, a request for the moderator. Depending on how the signature policy for math.stackexchange is upheld/modified, please either rollback all of the edits made to remove the signature, or else remove all of the answers/comments containing them. I would prefer they be rolled back now until a final ruling is made.

I am willing to give more arguments to justify the presence of signatures, as well as craft an appropriate policy for them. I am also willing (but not eager) to have my contributions to this forum removed. I want a good resolution to this issue for both me and the forming community.

Gerhard "Ask Me About System Design" Paseman, 2010.08.11

---End Part II


Gerhard "Relying on Kindness of Others" Paseman, 2010.08.11

@Gerhard: yes, it is not as easy to ask questions on meta.math.SE as it is here.

To the best of my knowledge you need to be registered both on the meta site and on the main math.SE site and have at least 100 rep there. Since you already do have more than 100 rep on the main site, I would think that if you just took a minute to register, you would then be able to ask questions. The button is at the top right of the screen, underneath the search bar.

The bit about not having a signature seems, as with other things on this site, to be explained only in some more central SE2.0 location. [Edit: looks like I'm wrong about that: it is on the math.SE FAQ. However the policy itself is coming from on high, whereas I would rather it be decided specifically by the site.] Being spoiled by MO, I am not super-enthusiastic about this sort of top-down approach either. Today I asked a question on the meta site concerning the (sort of curious, to me) way that rep is handled on the meta site. I was told that this was not site-specific enough and that I should ask my question at meta.SO. But my understanding is that in order to ask a question there, I would have to accumulate rep all over again. This seems unnecessarily tedious.

I hope you don't deliver too dire an ultimatum to the powers that be. Again, compared to the moderators here, they seem to be relatively intransigent. Though I hope I am wrong, I predict that the response will be: "These are the rules; sorry if you don't like them." It would be a shame to stop contributing useful math to a community site over this kind of dispute.

@Harry: yes, I gathered that meta.SO is the new central bureaucracy. Because it didn't click me through automatically but rather told me I had to set up a separate account, I thought that there would be no rep transfer. But I tried it just now and I have 101 rep on that site. So thank goodness for that...

By linking your meta.SO account with your math.SE account you will automatically start with 100 rep at meta.SO which is enough to do all the fundamentals. So it's not terribly onerous to go there.

@Andy: If you haven't been following meta.MU, there have been some issues with the moderators...

See here, which was closed by a moderator and reopened by the community.

and here, which was about the above closure.

It's not worth reading unless you're willing to read all of the comments. Regarding the MO/SO culture clash, it is a real thing, which is pretty clear if you follow meta.MU.

I apologize to Harry for not immediately acknowledging his help. Thank you, the proxy post looks fine.

I sense some of the political issues arising when I compare this thread, the thread in meta.math.SE, and my email correspondence on this issue. One of the reasons I keep unregistered accounts is the feeling I get of being apolitical by doing so. While it may seem minor and annoying to some, I think the (brief) signature is something to be preserved. For something comparable (in my not so humble opinion), I refer the reader to Ashleigh Brilliant and his Pot-Shots(trademark). So I shall brave the political waters for this cause. I might even merge some of my MO accounts someday.

I thank the MathOverflow community for putting up with the signature so far. I intend to use it only for good.

To Harry: If Will Jagy has your address, I will ask him to forward my next System Design installment to you.
Or you can look up my 1998 slides on determinant spectrum; they may have a working email address still, in which case you can make the request by email directly.

Gerhard "Your Rights: Defend or Lose" Paseman, 2010.08.12

@Harry : I'd hardly call the right to violate copyright law settled policy at MO. Some of us care about keeping MO on the right side of the law, especially since it is pretty easy to just go check the damn book out of the library.

"# Andy Putman @Harry : Will you please cut out the MO vs MU drama?"

@Harry: MU stands for mathupperflow - the higher-level MO for computers to talk to each other.