45 votes

Deletion of on-topic comment threads

Vote up this answer if you think the instrument of moving a comment thread to chat should be used along the lines of Todd Trimble's comment -- i.e. only if a discussion in comments goes off-topic or ...
Stefan Kohl's user avatar
  • 19.5k
43 votes
Accepted

How to cite comment by unknown user disproving Erdős conjecture?

This would not be a first, see arXiv:1909.00177 The citation (which I think follows the best practice) is [6] Fedja, Communication on the MathOverflow website (2018), available online at ...
Carlo Beenakker's user avatar
29 votes

How to cite comment by unknown user disproving Erdős conjecture?

The citation (which I think follows the best practice) Indeed, that was a good way to handle it :-) The priority here is, as I said many times, to give the due credit to MO and similar sites that ...
fedja's user avatar
  • 59.5k
21 votes

Answers in comments are increasingly more common

I saw this just after posting a comment on a question that could be considered a partial answer, but I left it as a comment for two reasons: I am not sure it constitutes an answer since it does not ...
Alec Rhea's user avatar
  • 8,947
17 votes

Answers in comments are increasingly more common

Idea: If you see an answer offered in the comments and left there, copy it into a community wiki answer. To answer Federico's comment: If there is an issue with licensing, rephrase the comment-answer ...
Harry Gindi's user avatar
  • 19.3k
15 votes

Answers in comments are increasingly more common

I think one thing that sometimes causes me to answer in a comment is if I suspect that the question, as stated, is not the one the asker meant to ask, and that seeing the answer to the question-as-...
Mike Shulman's user avatar
  • 64.8k
14 votes
Accepted

Is it ok to write a CW answer extracted from a comment of some user?

It's perfectly okay to do this, Praphulla. Usually that would be seen as a service to the community.
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 52.3k
12 votes
Accepted

Is it possible to see the source for a comment?

One approach would be to use the MathJax contextual menu to select the "Plain Source" renderer, which will show the TeX commands rather than typeset expressions. That means you would not ...
Davide Cervone's user avatar
11 votes
Accepted

Why did flagging a comment for deletion made it disappear immediately?

The related question on Meta.SE popped up today and I looked into this to see if I could figure it out. Looks like the misspelling of "Lipschitz" lead to a word that triggers single-flag ...
Catija's user avatar
  • 101
10 votes
Accepted

Can anyone learn anything from a downvote without an accompanying rationale in a comment?

I find this proposal completely unreasonable: "the questioner should have the right to petition the mods for a reversal of the vote." For one, think of the amount of workload this would add for the ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
10 votes

Hyperlink in a comment?

To make a link in a comment you can use the [text](url) syntax. (And, of course, you can use simply a bare URL - but I assume you want something nicer. Having some ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
9 votes

Why was my dissenting viewpoint in a post about diversity censored?

Update: I moved all of the comments that were not deleted by commenters to chat. Your comment is restored there. Older answer: I'll start by mentioning some context for the benefit of people who ...
S. Carnahan's user avatar
  • 45k
8 votes
Accepted

A remark on the abc conjecture

I think the remark you want is on page 361 of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Edit in response to a comment - the paragraph in question follows: The ABC conjecture has many other ...
S. Carnahan's user avatar
  • 45k
8 votes

Citing a mathoverflow comment

Comments are ephemeral on Stack Exchange and I wouldn't suggest citing a comment like you'd cite a question or an answer in a journal paper, if this is what you wish to do. It's true that ...
Massimo Ortolano's user avatar
8 votes

How to find highly upvoted comments?

This seems like something where SEDE could be used as a suitable tool. Using the SQL syntax you can find top comments in the Comments table - and you can add ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Is linking to comments possible?

To get a link to a comment, simply click on the timestamp next to it. (If it is your comment, be careful not to click on "Delete" by mistake.) For example, this is a link to the first ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Chat page has disappeared

That room was deleted, since it contained less than 15 messages, see this FAQ. I used my chat superpowers to undelete it, although it is bizarre that this happens for rooms created from comments. I've ...
Denis Nardin's user avatar
  • 16.2k
7 votes
Accepted

Searching for comments

The built-in search only searches in posts (questions and answers), so you will not find comments using that. One method which is reasonable is using Google with restricting to this site. For example:...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
6 votes

Comment template for questions more appropriate for MSE

Recommending Math.SE - but with caveat This is an attempt to expand a bit the suggestion in the question, by adding some links saying what a question at Math.SE should look like. MathOverflow is a ...
6 votes
Accepted

Is it possible to find out why a comment was deleted?

I deleted that comment in response to a 'no longer needed' flag, as it did not contain much concrete information (in contrast to Carlo Beenakker's response). Thus, to answer your question -- the ...
Stefan Kohl's user avatar
  • 19.5k
5 votes

Answer converted to comment, then reverted to answer

For full transparency, this was my request to the moderators after the answer was converted to a comment: I hope it's OK if I ask why this answer was deleted. The OP asks for intuition on the notion ...
Carlo Beenakker's user avatar
5 votes

The math! It's overflowing!

The problem is caused by the fact that if a comment contains many consecutive characters without a space, the Stack Exchange software inserts invisible unicode character (\unicode{x200C}\unicode{...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Migrating a question removes some comments?

From the FAQ post on migration: What is migration and how does it work? (in the section "Anything else I should know about migration?"): Comments on the question that link to the homepage of the ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
4 votes

Why did flagging a comment for deletion made it disappear immediately?

I don't have a full understanding of the specific process which was at work here, but the action was performed by the Community User which runs automatically in the background. When it saw your flag ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 52.3k
4 votes
Accepted

How to find the meta-thread of an MO-thread at hand? Is there one? Should there be?

If an MO question has spawned a meta thread, chances are the title of the MO question will appear somewhere in the meta thread, so typing that title into your favorite search engine along with site:...
Gerry Myerson's user avatar
4 votes

Automatic comments by Community

At least this part of the question has been basically answered in the comments: Is the algorithm to generate such comments known? Some of the comments explaining where these comments come from have ...
4 votes

Is it possible to see the source for a comment?

Some related posts elsewhere: How to copy mixture of text and latex formulas in a comment? (Mathematics Meta) Is there a way to view a comment's source? (Meta Stack Exchange) Some suggestions what ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

Why isn't the link processed in this comment?

There's a space between the [link text] and the (link itself). This is visible in e.g. SEDE:
Glorfindel's user avatar
  • 2,743
3 votes

How to find the meta-thread of an MO-thread at hand? Is there one? Should there be?

I will add to the suggestions already mentioned in answers/comments posts so far that you might try to look at recent posts on meta tagged specific-question. (This tag is used for discussion related ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
3 votes

Is it possible to see the source for a comment?

As mentioned in the comments, what appears to be happening is that macro definitions are stripped out when you ask your browser to display the Latex commands for some math you've highlighted (on ...

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible