Questions tagged [discussion]
The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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How do off-topic question askers find MO?
Apologies if this has been addressed on Meta before (it's a little hard to know the right keywords to search for Meta questions with).
Question: Has there been any systematic attempt to try to figure ...
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Acceptability of "Changes forced by the pandemic"
I refer to this question by André Henriques. It is nonstandard, and prima facie there is a clear case for closing it, and at the time of writing there is one vote to do that. However, I personally ...
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No MathJax line wrapping in Firefox
Example:
Chrome, for comparison:
Happens on Windows 10, both browsers are up to date.
Should I use the bug tag?
Does anybody else encounter this? Can it be something on my side?
After the question ...
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Make it evident that bounties are non-refundable or refund them on other people's questions
When I went to place my first bounty about a month ago, the question wasn't mine and I almost put up 500 rep to draw as much attention as possible figuring I'd only have to surrender said rep if ...
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Concern about sending to academia.stackexchange
There have been two questions today with suggestions (one acted on, at time of writing) to close, with the question being better asked at academia.stackexchange: Referee reports and Covid lessons.
In ...
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Should the rules for deleting own questions be modified? - an example
I am aware of the own question deletion rules - in particular, kindly provided in an answer to Rules for deleting one's own question by Martin Sleziak. I think these rules have to be changed ...
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Deletion of on-topic comment threads
This question is about suppression of threads of comments by moderators, moved to chat with the message "Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat", ...
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Efficacy of bounties by reward amount
Is there any data available on how often bountied questions receive answers? Can we stratify by bounty amount, to see if we're actually 'getting more bang for our buck' when we bounty higher amounts?
...
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What happened to the fonts?
It appears that MO (including MO Meta) has recently changed the display fonts:
I couldn't find any topics on MO Meta pertaining to this new change, hence this question. SO has also switched the fonts,...
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Moderator Elections: bug reporting for new voting UI
As we announced a few weeks ago, there is a new user interface for voting in moderator elections. Math Overflow will be the first Stack Exchange community to use the new UI when voting for your ...
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Three-vote close?
MO users might be interested in this StackExchange experiment:
Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites.
There has been considerable discussion around close-votes in MO Meta over the ...
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Why are there two separate tags (open-problem) and (open-problems)?
I assume that most likely this was just an oversight - but since it was a result of a moderator's action, it is probably better to ask than just remove the tag singlehandedly.1
Question: At the moment ...
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How to deal with answers that don't answer anything?
I'm really hesitant to put this on the table, but what should be done with answers that to do not contain anything of help related to the question?
Specifically I refer to this.
It is not the fact of ...
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Can we get rid of the "featured on meta" main meta links?
As you know, MathOverflow has a special status in the Stack Exchange family, and (by a special agreement) it doesn't display any kind of ads nor links to the hot network questions in the sidebar.
...
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Can I ask a question on MathOverflow and also on another site?
Sometimes one might ask a question on a website such as Mathematics Stack Exchange which is comparable but not identical to MathOverflow, and then decide to post the same question on MathOverflow. ...
Tim CampionMod
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Name of the site
This site keeps getting questions from users who have mistaken mathoverflow for a place to ask questions about elementary mathematics. This is not a problem for me, as those too-elementary questions ...
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(When) are "career advice" questions on-topic here? If and when such a question is on-topic, what to keep in mind in answering such a question?
We have a tag career and a tag advice. We don't have a flood of questions under these tags, but for several reasons I think it would also be appropriate for us to have a bit more guidance on meta ...
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Can I undelete questions deleted by the OP if I find them interesting?
I am not sure and I could not find anything about the ethical guidelines. A new user recently asked a question, which I've found interesting, as well as others, as it started some discussion, and then ...
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2021 Community Moderator Election
The 2021 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:
Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase
Most elections take between two and three weeks, ...
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Answers in comments are increasingly more common
I have checked a random sample of questions in the main page, and it seems that almost every one of them has some form of answer in the comments, apart from completely unanswered/untouched ones.
This ...
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Question about $i$ versus $-i$
I vaguely recall that some years ago, there was an MO question about how to distinguish between the complex numbers $i$ and $-i$, and in what sense this might be meaningful.
I also recall that I ...
CommunityBot
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How are hot meta posts decided?
I'm curious about the exact mechanisms behind the 'hot meta posts' blurb on the right hand side of the main/meta page.
I have been monitoring it for the past few days to see if my recent question ...
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Proposing a change to the close-vote interface
The feature request in this post is at the bottom; I will first highlight why I think it should be implemented. Currently, when I go to close-vote a question I see the following pop-up menu:
If I ...
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2021 Community Moderator Election Results
MathOverflow's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the three new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank them for ...
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2021 Moderator Election Q&A - Questionnaire
In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as ...
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How could I compute my "candidate score"?
I have noticed that, during elections for moderators, the candidates are awarded a "candidate score", computed from their activity on MO.
Is its algorithm public, so that I be able to ...
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Migration of a detailed answer on MathOverflow Meta to Math.SE
Upon reading Professor Hamkins' detailed answer to this recent Question about $i$ versus $-i$ here on MathOverflow Meta, and his accommodating comments:
Oh, I see now that this was a meta question,...
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Traffic from the list of hot network questions
To better understand the advantages and disadvantages of having MO questions featured in the list of hot network questions, as discussed here and here, it would be useful if Stack Exchange could ...
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2021 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection
The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.
MathOverflow is scheduled for an election next week, 29 March, 2021....
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2021 Moderator election: suggestions for nominees?
As you may have seen, the nominations for the 2021 moderator election will be open on March 29. Per StackExchange rules, MO users are expected to nominate themselves for the election. For some ...
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What do moderators do these days?
More than 7 years ago, Scott Morrison asked a great meta question: What do moderators do?, and recorded some useful answers. Some seem to be of general significance, but many of the answers were ...
Tim CampionMod
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How acceptable is prosemirror-math as an editor style for this site?
This is a follow-up to one of the possible answers to the recently-announced changes to the editor.
Prosemirror-math is a math editing framework that allows for direct editing of a rich-text preview. ...
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Reason for the 2021 moderator election
There are three possible reasons for having the moderators election this year (with 3 positions to fill):
3 moderators from the current team have decided to step down (for reasons that I consider ...
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Would newly elected moderators join the board of MathOverflow Inc.?
MathOverflow is a bit different from most of the sites in the network in that it is not operated only by Stack Exchange, but it "belongs" also to the nonprofit MathOverflow corporation.
If I ...
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Should [tag:feynman-integral] be a synonym of [tag:path-integral]?
The question is in the title: I see no benefit from having these two tags for essentially the same concept (particularly as the path-integral wiki excerpt refers to the path integral formulation of ...
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`positive-characteristic` and `characteristic-p` are synonyms
I thought that tag synonyms were meant simply to be proposed and left to survive or die on their own, but I see another question in HNQ about tag synonyms, so maybe one is supposed to raise a ...
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What about bountying a meta question?
While I do agree in principle that anything meta should not have anything to do with reputation changes, there might still be cases when one would like to stimulate more activity with some difficult ...
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Why do many experts on MathOverflow mention their full names on their profiles?
Sometimes I click on the users accounts on both MSE and Math Overflow sites. I noticed there are many users on MSE, prefer to be anonymous unless on the other site. and noticed there are many ...
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Reviving questions from the PROMYS application?
This elaborates on a comment I made on David Speyer's meta post.
Someone posted at least one problem from this year's PROMYS application on MO--without labeling it as such, of course. One concerned ...
Ben WebsterMod
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Discouraging (Some) Upvotes
I'm tagging this as "discussion", not as a feature request, because I am quite agnostic about whether it's a good idea.
That said: My subjective impression is that lately a lot of very bad/...
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Tag [upper-bounds] is nowhere to be found
At the moment, MathOverflow has tag lower-bounds (100 questions), but no tag upper-bounds. Are lower bounds that much harder to compute? Or that much more interesting?
Worse, due to the non-existence ...
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Which Latex / MathJax features do we need or want to have supported on the site?
As we've started discussing, Stack Exchange is planning to redo the editor for all questions and answers across all their sites. As articulated by Emilio Pisanty, these changes will have significant ...
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How should [applications] be applied?
Is tag applications for
applications of mathematics to mathematics itself?
applications of mathematics to other fields?
applications of mathematics to any field?
job applications? (e.g., ...
Tim CampionMod
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Down vote without comment
I received a down vote on this question without any comment.
Can one help me to understand how this question could be improved?
I think that a moral and implicit policy of MO is that a comment ...
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Rationale for reputation change on "my" reputation page that says 'User was removed'
At MathOverflow > Help center > Reputation & Moderation I see the following:
[...] a user who voted for one of your posts had their account deleted (either by request or due to violating ...
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Request to keep an eye out for PROMYS admissions problems
Many of you may be familiar with PROMYS, a camp based out of Boston University which teaches number theory to high school students each summer. Students applying to the program are asked to submit ...
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What does the graph of MO questions-and-links look like?
Consider the graph $G$ whose vertices are MO questions and edges are links between the questions. What does $G$ look like?
I'm happy to define a "link" in the same way the SE software seems ...
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How can we attract more grad students?
To quote an answer to a recent meta.MO question:
Here are some examples of people we would like the site to be
welcoming to:
Prominent mathematicians who are less "online" than the typical ...
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What makes you vote to close a question?
Some recent exchanges and observations suggest to me that users not only have different thresholds for voting to close a question yet still applying the same criteria, but that they even apply so ...
Tim CampionMod
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What do we mean by welcoming when we're a site aimed at researchers?
I was just browsing the main page this morning, and I decided to look at some of the posts by new people. One of the questions had garnered three votes to close and a comment from a regular user to ...
Tim CampionMod
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