This question should be migrated to meta.mathoverflow.net.

And indeed, this belongs on meta. Voting to migrate...

I agree with this. I had a good sense of community from the old MO, and we ought to be cautious about maintaining continuity. (Already I fear there has been attrition, and that we're in danger of losing some of the most valued contributors we had before.)

In the old westerns (as in the movie genre), a lonely tumbleweed rolling through a ghost town would indicate the utter desolation of the place. Sort of like an entertainer being greeted not with applause, but with utter silence save for crickets chirping. Try to accept the badge with a sense of humor; something like it happens to almost every user on occasion.

I am quite leary of allowing open problems for two reasons: (1) Goldbach's Conjecture, Twin Prime Conjecture, Riemann Hypothesis would be like opening the floodgates to crank posts, and (2) attributions and credits could get very messy, especially with the damned point system muddying matters. Oh and (3) asking a famous open question is the easiest and laziest thing in the world; do we really want to upvote questions that take no thought up to the skies? Much better would be a kind of polymath divide-and-conquer approach, where big problems are broken down to smaller ones in an organized way.

Hm. I must be doing something dumb.

No prob! ​​​

:-D ...........

There's something very Zen or Taoist about this answer. John Baez once wrote, somewhere on the internet, "Your readers might want to check out my own Taoist blog, where I say everything worth saying about the Tao." where the final words were a link to a blank page. :-)

quid: thanks, that looks a lot clearer to me. Also: we agree that this 15 character thing is actually not a great idea, but I'm glad to have your insight on why it's there to begin with. Finally: I like this question, and hope that some clever person will provide a clever answer.

quid: (1) there is no need to bring up the other thread. I operate on a case-by-case basis. (2) It seems to me the title could be "Bottom Line", and it would be clearer to replace the first few words "A simple solution could be that" by "Hopefully", since there is no solution described, whether with an indefinite or definite article. You want me to edit that?

Joseph asks a good question, and I can easily imagine people not being aesthetically satisfied with Joel's solution. I don't like the heading "What could be a solution?" because the only "solution" you give is "don't do this thing that bothers me", which is redundant. (Hey: why do we even need this 15 character lower bound anyway?)

I'd agree with quid, and add that it's comparatively rare that answers to "MO-appropriate questions" actually involve novel ideas. Many such questions arise when a mathematician needs to investigate something outside his/her comfort zone, and feels sure that some expert out there would be able to supply the knowledge he/she is missing.

"Professional mathematicians" is not a bad shorthand; it's pithier than what might be more accurate, "mathematicians of professional caliber" (the difference being that some people answering to that description are not actually paid as mathematicians).

Okay, thanks. I of course agree that CW has been abused on occasion in the past. But I stand by my opinion that Frank Thorne has not indulged in any questionable behavior whatsoever, slipping in a question through a back door as it were. In fact, the question is absolutely fine IMO and concerns a situation many professionals will face, and it is certain that there is no definitive or objective right answer; in my understanding CW is highly appropriate for that, and there is certainly a long history of CW being applied that way on MO. With that, I think we can let the matter rest for now.

@Manishearth : I'm fine with moderators pitching in; the thing I don't like is that it is only moderators who can have the finger on the CW button. This seems to me, in a practical sense, an unnecessary degree of control (and I don't like any time delay between non-CW converting to CW; it should be something that can be rendered instantly, IMO).