While doing some cleanup on the home page just now, I noticed that we have a new community specific reason to close.
The second option in the list is new, and leaves me slightly confused. While I understand that we don't generally welcome 'hey ckeck my paoer' or 'is this result new and groundbreaking' type questions, the wording of the last sentence in the new close reason leaves me wondering if it's now forbidden to post attempts at work and ask if we're on the right track.
For example, I frequently see people asking questions about excercises or definitions in Lurie's HTT -- things like
'I'm trying to construct the blorp from Def X.XXX.XXXXXXX and see that it satisfies Lem XXX.XXX, but I think there's a missing hypothesis in the statement of Lem XXX.XXX. Am I going crazy?'
together with the attempted blorp construction and an attempt at proving that it satisfies some lemma (I don't have any specific examples off hand, but I'm confident that a search for 'Lurie HTT' on the main site would produce several).
These questions have historically been well-received, but seem like they might fall under the purview of the new close reason -- this is a persons attempted proof that we are being asked to verify. Is this done with intent, i.e. did the moderator team decide that these questions didn't fit at MO and change the close reasons accordingly, or am I misinterpreting the new close reason and applying it too broadly?
I'm also curious about (admittedly much less common) situations where some question starts out on MO, the questioner writes a paper about the question that doesn't 'answer' it but is relevant to the question, and then comes back and adds a link to the paper in the question. Would this run afoul of the new close reason?
I recently asked a question that got a good amount of views and some positive feedback but no real progress on the question asked. I've written a short (16 page) note on the content of the question that will appear on the arxiv tonight, and was planning on adding a footnote to the question mentioning this fact whenever the note went live, but seeing the new close reason makes me wonder if I'll be violating new community norms by linking in the paper.
Put more concisely,
How should we interpret the new close reason as it pertains to questions that are about checking someones work when that work is itself an attempt at reproducing some tricky lemma etc. from a well known paper/research monograph? How should we interpret it as it pertains to linking in papers written about MO questions by the MO asker after the question was originally asked?
Any relevant opinions are appreciated.
