Timeline for How can we visually differentiate MathOverflow from MathStackExchange within the constraints of the new design themes?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
27 events
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| Dec 18, 2018 at 12:13 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
changed link to the question to link to the answer - this was probably intended
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| Dec 15, 2018 at 6:21 | comment | added | David Roberts Mod | To repeat what I said in chat: when the window width is narrow enough to switch to a mobile layout, the 'Search on MathOverflow/Mathematics/Generic.SE.site' vanishes, leaving no sign when scrolled down, just the StackExchange logo. | |
| Dec 14, 2018 at 18:37 | answer | added | Federico Poloni | timeline score: 7 | |
| Dec 13, 2018 at 20:01 | answer | added | Martin Sleziak | timeline score: 6 | |
| Dec 13, 2018 at 17:20 | answer | added | David E Speyer | timeline score: 17 | |
| Dec 13, 2018 at 3:11 | history | edited | Tim Campion | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 162 characters in body
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| Dec 13, 2018 at 1:53 | history | edited | Tim Campion | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 239 characters in body
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| Dec 13, 2018 at 1:50 | answer | added | Tim Campion | timeline score: 5 | |
| Dec 13, 2018 at 1:48 | answer | added | Tim Campion | timeline score: 2 | |
| Dec 13, 2018 at 1:46 | answer | added | Tim Campion | timeline score: 17 | |
| Dec 12, 2018 at 19:58 | comment | added | Catija Staff | @FedericoPoloni I think that Jon explains it a bit better than I could: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/319089/… We want to make intentional choices rather than haphazard ones. A couple of color statements here and there is what got us where we are right now.... with extremely complex and different sites... but nothing you mention in your comment is out of the realm of possibility. Tag colors and background colors/patterns are customizable. | |
| Dec 12, 2018 at 8:47 | comment | added | Harry Gindi | Big fan of the color orange here =]! | |
| Dec 11, 2018 at 18:53 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Since you listed the differences, perhaps this is worth adding to the list. (It's easy to miss, but OTOH it remains even when I scroll.) On most pages - and when I haven't recently done some search on the site - I see in the top bar "Search on MathOverflow" vs. "Search on Mathematics". | |
| Dec 11, 2018 at 12:45 | comment | added | Tim Campion | @GeraldEdgar As somebody who uses both sites, and often has multiple tabs from each site open in my browser at a time, I would personally prefer to have more visual cues differentiating the two sites than there are currently. | |
| Dec 11, 2018 at 12:41 | comment | added | Gerald Edgar | WHY? It seems to me a big mathoverflow at the top is enough to differentiate "us" from "them". | |
| Dec 11, 2018 at 10:53 | comment | added | Federico Poloni |
@Catija Sounds like you are suggesting a false dichotomy here. You can have visually different sites even without the technical debt of maintaining many lines of code. A couple of color statement in a CSS, a different background pattern and a few custom buttons are enough to differentiate them visually.
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| Dec 11, 2018 at 10:52 | comment | added | Denis Nardin | Also, beyond the color differences, every distinction that is not in the "central column" (where Q&A or the list of questions are) is going to be essentially invisible for me. I don't think I'm the only one that looks only at the central column while navigating the site. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 21:42 | comment | added | Catija Staff | This simplification of the site designs is our solution to get away from a mountain of technical debt in preference of simplicity and rolling out features people have been wanting for years. Cleaning this up is removing something like 16k lines of code for site-specific customizations. It's also giving us a home base (the left sidebar) for projects we're working on like Custom Questions Lists and it gives us a place to host Teams navigation, which is currently Stack Overflow-specific. Another feature is the responsive nature of the pages, which we've had long-time outstanding requests for. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 21:39 | comment | added | Catija Staff | @DenisNardin It may depend on which sites you use. Many of the sites have design elements that set them apart from others but some sites definitely end up looking very much the same - particularly, I'm guessing, for users like yourself who may not be able to see color differences. We're working on accessibility concerns for the entire network but that won't really address the sites looking the same. We've long had the problem of having difficulty adding new features to the network because the sites' CSS were so different, we'd spend as much time fixing bugs as developing the feature. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 10:31 | comment | added | Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine | @none: From the user end, it was great before. But StackExchange has explained in various places that one of the motivations for the change was about work behind the scenes: maintaining many highly divergent sites was a lot more labour-intensive for them than maintaining a single more unified codebase. This seems a fair reason — unlike the claimed “improvements” for users, which I agree feel more like a step backwards. So the approach of this question seems much fairer, and more likely to succeed, than asking for a full rollback. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 10:19 | comment | added | Denis Nardin | @Catija Could you clarify why SE is using color schemes that are so similar with each other for different sites? For me this is the main reason why all sites feel the same (note that I am colorblind, so my color perception could be different from the "standard" one) | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 7:32 | comment | added | none | Just put it back the way it was please. It worked fine. It wasn't broken and didn't need fixing. | |
| Dec 10, 2018 at 4:57 | comment | added | Catija Staff | Hey MO! Commenting here to be pingable if you have any questions I can help with. Some ideas that aren't in your list - tag colors can be customized to be more different. If the site used to be more green/orange, we could go with green tags with white text. We can also change the color of the question titles in the questions list and links can be colored separately from the titles or they can be the same color. Tags don't scroll but they're more visible in more places. Same with links, which appear to be blue on both sites. | |
| Dec 9, 2018 at 21:30 | comment | added | Federico Poloni | Maybe we should consider having the words "research mathematics" appear somewhere on the front page? If you access the site without being logged into an account, it already says "MathOverflow is a question and answer site for professional mathematicians". But I agree with you that we should warn new users more prominently that this isn't a site for their homework and has strict standards on what is acceptable. | |
| Dec 9, 2018 at 19:36 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added (math-se) tag since the question is about distinction from that site - feel free to remove the tag if you think it is not a good fit for the question
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| Dec 9, 2018 at 19:19 | history | edited | Tim Campion | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Dec 9, 2018 at 19:09 | history | asked | Tim Campion | CC BY-SA 4.0 |