70 votes

Anonymity Policy

There are two important reasons to allow anonymous users. There are countries/regions where western education, or women's education in particular is a dangerous issue. There are many more that ...
EJI's user avatar
  • 93
59 votes

Stack Exchange moderation strike

It should be noted that users other than moderators can sign the open letter and likewise refrain from curation activities across the network, including MathOverflow, to the extent they feel ...
David Roberts's user avatar
  • 32.9k
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
  • 18.9k
33 votes

What to do when a post contains a "suspicious" link (possibly with copyrighted material)?

This is an answer as a private member of MO, without my moderator hat on. I'll admit I've never understood the argument that there could be something wrong with linking; the internet is a big scary ...
Scott Morrison's user avatar
31 votes

Catering to professional appearance a bit much?

I support Darij completely. I'll even go a bit further and say that any thread that stood open since 2009 until 2019 without any complaints or controversies is good enough to stand forever and I'd ...
fedja's user avatar
  • 57.9k
25 votes

Anonymity Policy

Adding to EJI's arguments in favor of anonymity (please upvote their post if you agree with my arguments): [EDIT: These arguments are in favor of allowing anonymity by default; as far as I understand,...
darij grinberg's user avatar
24 votes

What to do when a post contains a "suspicious" link (possibly with copyrighted material)?

The OCILLA (part of DMCA) already specifies a process (notice and takedown) that takes care of these issues. This process also removes from us the burden of determining whether a particular link is ...
Dmitri Pavlov's user avatar
24 votes

VIndictive downvoting--what can be done about such childishness, errh, lack of professionalism?

Tom: after checking tools available to moderators, I see no evidence of systematic downvoting from any particular user. So at the moment I don't see evidence of downvoting that looks 'vindictive'. I ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
21 votes
Accepted

What are our procedures if a user complains about harassment or abuse?

My apologies for being slow to respond, but I felt there should also be a response from the moderators here. MO is covered by Stack Exchange's Conduct Policy (https://meta.stackexchange.com/conduct) ...
Ben Webster's user avatar
  • 43.2k
18 votes
Accepted

Rationale for moderator deletion of a non-spammy, off-topic question

There's no clear-cut controversy here: five users closed this as not suitable for this site, then the OP asked to have it deleted, and this was done via two votes (Stefan Kohl being the second). The ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
15 votes

How to discourage excessive self-edits?

In the Internet world (and also in the real world) non native English speakers have huge disadvantage. Gaining some attention to one's MO questions and answers due to the need to edit them more is a ...
Gil Kalai's user avatar
  • 24.2k
14 votes

Proper protocol for edit wars

As a longtime Wikipedia contributor who has been around a lot of truly crazy edit wars, my advice is: never revert more than once even if the other person's edit is terrible. Instead leave a comment ...
none's user avatar
  • 1,117
14 votes

What are our procedures if a user complains about harassment or abuse?

The obvious answer: Questions and answers containing harassment can get downvoted. Posts with sufficiently many downvotes can be deleted. Questions, answers and comments containing harassment can be ...
Federico Poloni's user avatar
13 votes

Anonymity Policy

I think whether or which changes should be made to the anonymity policy of MO depends crucially on the nature of the recent "attacks" on MO, and without more information on them being disclosed, a ...
Stefan Kohl's user avatar
  • 18.9k
12 votes

What are our procedures if a user complains about harassment or abuse?

At least from the user side, there is a procedure that hasn't been listed yet: following the link to https://mathoverflow.net/contact and contacting support with "I want to report a Code of ...
user44191's user avatar
  • 4,901
12 votes

Stack Exchange moderation strike

Stack Exchange have posted their analysis of the technical background about ChatGPT use etc here. In summary, they believe that there was a surge of ChatGPT-generated answers when ChatGPT first ...
Neil Strickland's user avatar
11 votes

Catering to professional appearance a bit much?

Here are some comments on your suggestions and the topic in general: Professional mathematical interest in a question or an answer might well be a good necessary condition for MO but it will not make ...
Joonas Ilmavirta's user avatar
11 votes

Flagging Low Quality Questions

Speaking as a pretty active moderator: the amount of this type of flag raising that I see hasn't been a problem, not for me. In some ways I think it helps, to see how others are gauging the quality of ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
10 votes

How to discourage excessive self-edits?

I am not familiar with software management of MO, so I do not know whether the following suggestion is applicable or no?But I guess that it is easy to be applied. Suggestion 1: Consideration of ...
Ali Taghavi's user avatar
9 votes
Accepted

Is there a way for moderators to contact MO users personally?

Yes, moderators can contact a user that has an account in the community they are moderating using private messages. When the moderator contacts a user, the user can also reply (once) to the moderator ...
Anton Menshov's user avatar
8 votes

Is there a way for moderators to contact MO users personally?

In response to Praphulla's comment below the question: normally moderators are made aware of conflicts because someone has flagged them for attention. A common type of flag presents mods with the ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
8 votes

Mixed reviews - can I have a decision reversed?

The post was flagged as 'spam'. I did not think it rose to the level of spam as I understand that word, and so I declined the flag. (If a vendor creates a link to his or her site for a commercial ...
Todd Trimble's user avatar
  • 51.8k
8 votes
Accepted

Rationale for migration to MSE of a well-received question on MO

The phrasing of the reason is unfortunate, IMO. It makes sense to migrate if a question is better suited to MSE; it doesn't necessarily make sense to migrate just because the question can be answered ...
Timothy Chow's user avatar
  • 75.9k
6 votes

Flagging Low Quality Questions

It seems that we are mostly talking here about close flags and very low quality flags - since these are the two types of flags which seem reasonable in the case of low quality questions (whichever ...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
6 votes
Accepted

I lost my three questions

Since this question was posted, the situation has changed - now any user can find all their deleted posts. Simply go to your profile and in the question tab you can click on "deleted questions&...
Martin Sleziak's user avatar
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
  • 18.9k
5 votes

Catering to professional appearance a bit much?

Thank you for making your proposal. I see that you have put a lot of thought into it. My counter-proposal (that I haven't specifically run by the other moderators) is that content on MathOverflow be ...
S. Carnahan's user avatar
  • 44.7k

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