A nice question by Michael Hardy, How many rearrangements must fail to alter the value of a sum before you conclude that none do?, led to a recent 6-author collaboration, 5 or 6 of whom are MO patrons ...

I brought this up with the moderation team in email; I haven't heard back explicitly from everyone, but have an idea where most of us stand. For now no official action will be taken. Putting aside ...

The moderation team is asked each year whether MO is going to participate in Winter Bash, and we've consistently declined. We had a discussion about it here. So, no hats, at least not so far. There ...

According to this meta stackexchange post, it just means that the "About me" section was left blank. (If you are looking at your own profile page and see the message "Your about me is currently blank",...

I have cast a final vote to reopen, but: I would encourage users to give History of Science and Mathematics a try in cases like this. (It is in danger of becoming moribund, which I think would be a ...

[REOPENED] The OP of this question Connected sum is well-defined for surfaces, proof? requests reconsideration to reopen. It was closed as a duplicate, but OP says that what is asked for was not ...

Unless the voters want to weigh in themselves, we can only guess. As I see it, the question is not at all well motivated, and there is no hint why anyone might think that there are infinitely many ...

The answer is 'no', essentially always. Spam is one of the worst abuses of the system and we want to prune it out on the spot. The usual recourse for a site moderator is to destroy the account ...

What Stefan wrote in his comment is germane: if an answer has a positive net score, then the OP cannot delete the post: How can I delete my post on Stack Overflow?. Moreover: the moderators get a lot ...

As I mentioned in one of my comments, I wrote a Turkish academic in the United States who is close to this issue, and she kindly responded thus: Dear Todd (if I may), I just received the ...

In addition to my comment that the thread is too "discussion-y" (meaning too opinion or speculation driven), my feeling about this question is that there is probably no one in our community who can ...

Since there was a moderator flag, I went ahead and performed the edit to the question based on asm's "answer" and evident intentions.

Here is a comprehensive description of actions which lead to reputation change, and by how much: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/269653/why-did-i-gain-lose-reputation-can-i-audit-my-...

I have performed the merge of enumeration into enumerative-combinatorics, with no synonyms, as quid recommended (and I agree with that recommendation). Luckily this was not a hard decision to make. ...

The most substantial comment on why the post should be closed was quid's last, so we may as well record it here: the question has the potential to become a crank magnet. (Other than that, the comment ...

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 ...

StackExchange sites work on the basis of community moderation: as a user gains reputation through upvoted questions and answers, moderation powers increase: https://mathoverflow.net/help/privileges. ...

"Not research-level" is not a well-defined phrase, and there is wide variance among users as to what it means. But it might mean here that the users who voted to close thought it was too easy to take ...

Although the question at MO has been reopened, the meta post is not completely moot: let me remind users that there is a meta thread dedicated to the requests for reopening: Requests for reopen and ...

[REOPENED] This question was heavily downvoted and closed: When a compact topological manifold with boundary is a ball? Color me ignorant, perhaps, but I wondered if it were as trivial as the ...

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 ...

There's a meta stackexchange thread on this topic, here: Cancelling upvote on comment?. In brief, you can change your mind -- "upvoting" again undoes the upvote -- provided that you do it quickly (...

Keith Kearnes, together with co-authors Emil Kiss and Ágnes Szendrei, recently published a solution to Varieties where every algebra is free in this arxiv preprint. They prove a result under an ...

I'm not interested. I've got enough going on as it is; I really don't want to feel obliged to deal with 'informal (chit-)chat'. I took a quick look at the M.SE. chat room and quite a lot of it seems ...

The request to merge was granted (thanks to a StackExchange Community Manager), and the question raised in comments as to whether the MO user named 000 coincides with Erin Carmody has been settled ...

Most of the time, the edits that I see on MO are respectfully and tactfully performed and small in scope, and gratefully received by the post's author as improvements. Occasionally though I see flare-...

Privacy concerns are legitimate, even though I do not feel that one has any factual basis on which to make claims of spying or unethical behavior, whether on the part of individuals or corporations. I'...

[RE-OPENED] I believe the post Can you write $\mathbb R^2$ as a disjoint union of two totally disconnected sets? has been closed (or put "on hold") erroneously, as a duplicate of Can you explicitly ...

I have merged the tags. I didn't try to track how many experts in complex variables (whether in one or several variables) weighed in, but to my non-expert eyes the proposal seemed reasonable.

I feel your pain. :-) But as for the first question, I would say no. For example, it happens sometimes that strong mathematicians decide to post to MO for the first time, and your suggestion would not ...