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While the MathOverflow site is operated by Stack Exchange, Inc., the domain and the MathOverflow name are owned by the MathOverflow corporation. The MathOverflow corporation is completely independent from Stack Exchange and its mission is to ensure the continued operation of the site in a manner that meets the needs and expectations of the community.
On May ...
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Using MathOverflow should be an extension of the way you normally do mathematics, and the same rules you use to effectively solve problems can be used to make good MO questions. Just like solving problems, crafting good questions requires you to put in some effort!
Ask a focused question that has a specific goal
Be precise
Do your homework
Break it down
...
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You own all of your posts! You retain full copyrights and you can do anything you please with them.
However, by posting on MathOverflow, you release your content under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This license allows MathOverflow, Stack Exchange and others to use your content under specific terms. This ...
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Upvotes on questions now only contribute +5, rather than the original +10. There are a number of other changes, but this explains the bulk.
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I'd say that this is a bit of a grey area. If you want to ask a question of this type then you should prepare it carefully: do your best to isolate the specific point that you are confused about, explain it carefully, make sure that you understand the definitions of all the ingredients, and so on. If you cannot isolate a specific point of confusion, then ...
24
I began this answer with a salutation, and hopefully it was never posted, because that's what the system is supposed to do, as per Jeff Atwood's answer on Meta Stack Exchange:
We now automatically remove salutations from posts as they are entered.
I got really tired of performing this edit over and over, so anything matching the form of …
^ #...
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I have quite good eyes, and I have to say that in order to tell if any of the highlighted favorite tags are actually highlighted I tip my laptop at an absurd angle. Could this shade be any closer to white? This seems to defeat the purpose.
I had this same complaint at a different SE site and learned how to manually fix it, but it is kind of a pain for non-...
23
I think that new users would do well to ask some precise mathematical questions and/or give some precise mathematical answers before trying to ask imprecise philosophical questions.
Regardless of what you think about the rate at which we should have soft questions, I think it's clear that we should not be having soft questions like this one from new users. ...
22
Here is the CSS I was talking about:
/* Unanswered questions box */
.status.unanswered, .status.unanswered .mini-counts, .status.unanswered strong {
border: none;
background-color: #833700;
color: #FFF
}
/* Answered questions box */
.status.answered,.status.answered .mini-counts,.status.answered strong {
border: none;
background-...
21
Now that we've done the import, we'll need to refresh our global network cache of users and posts from all sites. The fun part is this is a huge job, so we have to take portions of the API offline for a bit to do it...which means we don't want to do it twice.
Today we'll be checking that everything is ready for a backfill and we don't need to do anything ...
21
The members of the MO board are the six current moderators, Anton Geraschenko, and Ravi Vakil.
Whoever becomes a moderator becomes a member of that board.
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The question you answered is community wiki, and this also makes all answers community wiki.
There is no reputation for votes on community wiki questions and answers.
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This is an important question, thanks!
My response is a clarification of @Todd's answer, but it seems better to give it as a separate answer. The board exists because of the need of a legal entity to enter into an agreement with SE. It has seen its role as to have a negligible footprint, although at our annual meeting we always ask ourselves how the ...
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[RE-OPENED and later CLOSED again]
The question How the idea of adjoint matrix has been designed? isn't great, but isn't awful, and these two answers have been posted (and upvoted) on G+ rather than as answers, which is dumb. Let's reopen the question so that the answers can be added.
As an aside, the fact that Allen Knutson basically said "this is going ...
19
Update: Donations are now possible, see this post: Donations to MathOverflow, Inc
[Apologies for the long delay in answering, I was on my honeymoon! I may update this quick answer after I get back to regular life.]
Up until now, MathOverflow has been paying for regular expenses through a generous grant from The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Coincidentally, ...
18
What can I do?
This is a simple issue that can be quickly rectified by following the steps below:
Go ahead and create a new account using whatever authentication service you were using previously. Make a note of the profile URL - you can get to the new profile by clicking on your user name at the top of the page. Keep this handy.
Locate your original ...
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Suggested in comments but I don't know if this is allowed. In any case: I've used an OCR program to copy the contents of the 2.5 pages below. I've used some minimal editing to keep the format vaguely similar, but as this was computerised there may be some errors, so this is community wiki; please fix them as you find them.
June 22, 2013
Anton Geraschenko
...
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It's now at tea.mathoverflow.net!
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If you ask a question you're asking a favor (the eventual award of MO-points does not change this fact). This means that you should give the public something in return. The formulation of the question should not be egoistic, just for sake of getting an answer. Within reason, you should educate MO-public about the topic. Thus the formulation should be as self-...
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Just click on the Blue Stack Exchange sign, and there's a link to meta there.
Update: This no longer works, and now one must click on the "word bubble symbol" at the extreme right of the toolbar to get to meta.
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Naturally, we do not discuss details of individual users. This is indeed an unusual suspension. Also note that this is a network-wide suspension, so this is not necessarily related to this user's behavior on MathOverflow.
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Mariano hadn't used the moderation interface for an extended period, and was proving hard to contact. The StackExchange staff said they wanted to remove his diamond, mostly as a security measure.
We didn't object (SE raised this in the moderator chat room, and I suspect not everyone had even seen this), but I think that if there is concern, either from ...
15
They got selected for deletion because of lack of community interest:
If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...
has a score of 0, or a score of 1 in case of deleted owner
has no answers
is not locked
has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5
has 1 or 0 comments
... it will be automatically deleted.
(See the original post on ...
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You can find links to some basic info on favorites here, specifically this post is rather detailed: How do favorite questions work?
This feature request has been posted on main meta a few years ago: Add a page explaining the favorites feature to the Help Center. Existence of this feature request suggests that you are probably not the only person who ...
15
Here is a snapshot of the site analytics to which Martin refers:
So, roughly $40,000$ page views per day (in the summer).
Might be interesting to know what happened on May 14th and on August 8th...
15
There is no formal connection. You may often see the same question on both sites because a lot of people cross-post (manually), a practice which is generally frowned upon, especially when the same question appears at both sites almost simultaneously and the poster doesn't mention anything about cross-posting or doesn't link to the question at the other site. ...
15
You can hide the part in HTML comments:
BEFORE <!-- this is something I want to hide --> AFTER
produces:
BEFORE AFTER
Spoilers would be another option, but perhaps less clear in conveying the intention.
>! This is something I want to hide
produces
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
