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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 ...
answered Oct 5 '13 at 22:47
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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 ...
answered Oct 3 '13 at 0:20
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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 ...
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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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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-...
20
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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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, ...
answered Aug 1 '15 at 13:38
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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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[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 ...
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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 ...
17
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-...
17
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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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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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.
answered Sep 7 '18 at 8:24
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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 ...
answered Apr 11 '15 at 0:46
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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...
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Any user with at least 15 reputation points should flag the post as spam. After 6 spam flags, the post is deleted. In addition to being deleted, even for users who can see the deleted posts, the content of the post is hidden - although they can still access the revision history. The same thing happens after a total of 6 flags that are either "spam", or "rude ...
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
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The users page has a tab for moderators. They can be reached via email at moderators@mathoverflow.net.
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Simply remove the tag from your question, unless someone else uses the tag it will be removed in 24 hours. Here is a very similar question from meta.SO: I accidentally created a tag. How do I delete it?
More details on pruning of low-usage tags:
The process removing tags having no questions is running once in 24 hours, see How can we get rid of misspelled ...
14
I want to see how may people also have this problem or if I am the only one, so let me conduct a basic poll.
$\bullet$ If you have the problem where typing a long answer with plenty of mathematics symbols (an answer that fills at least one or two pages) on mathoverflow runs slowly, then upvote this answer.
$\bullet$ If you do not have any delays when ...
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Let me summarize what was said in commments and in chat.
There are a few related feature requests on Meta Stack Exchange, but my impression is that they are unlikely to get implemented: Make the “past names” list public info for 30 days after changing your name, Keep short history of user display names. (This one is also related, to some extent: Change all @...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible