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I was framing a question for meta.math regarding a proposal of starting a blog where users can submit articles related to mathematics.

I googled it about it first, and I found this website: https://math.blogoverflow.com/.

which pretty much looks like what I was going to propose.

What is the story behind this math.blogoverflow.com Why it was closed/shut down? Did it receive poor traffic or response?

Please re tag accordingly.

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    $\begingroup$ Perhaps you can find a bit about the Math.SE blog on this meta if you browse a bit through the posts tagged (blog). (Possibly the tag-info should be updated to clearly indicate that the blog is no longer active.) A post about creation of the blog: Announcement: the MathStackExchange Blog is active, and Call for Content! This was relevant mainly while it was active: Community Blog FAQ $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Mar 21 '19 at 13:02
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    $\begingroup$ The blog did not get many contributions: Is the M.SE blog dead? After the project was discontinued network-wide, it remains at least as static pages which archive the original content posted there while it was active: How can I save blog posts? $\endgroup$ – Martin Sleziak Mar 21 '19 at 13:04
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    $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak your comments seems like a good answer to me. $\endgroup$ – quid♦ Mar 21 '19 at 17:15
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    $\begingroup$ Hopefully, this is not completely off topic. Math3ma is a blog for expository (which I like a lot) run by graduate students. $\endgroup$ – Alex Vong Mar 25 '19 at 20:31
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    $\begingroup$ @AlexVong Thanks Alex :) $\endgroup$ – A B Mar 26 '19 at 3:59
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As the comments point out, the blog gradually became inactive and eventually Stack Exchange discontinued the entire Blog Overflow system. The second link contains most of the relevant information, but to summarize:

  • At the time they did this evaluation, "only the SciFi blog was remotely active." That's across the entire Stack Exchange network.
  • Meanwhile, the maintenance overhead was becoming prohibitive.
  • Worldbuilding successfully started an external blog on Medium, which is still somewhat active today.

Therefore, they decided that it would be best to stop hosting the blogs themselves, since Blog Overflow's mere existence seemed neither necessary nor sufficient for a successful community blog to exist.

Importantly, Stack Exchange has no objection whatsoever to semi-official external blogs. They have actively encouraged sites to follow in Worldbuilding's footsteps. When they shut down SciFi's blog, they permanently redirected it to an external site with the same content, run by a couple of regular users (which is also somewhat active today). There is nothing stopping Mathematics from starting our own external blog, provided we can maintain a reasonable level of community participation in the long run.

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    $\begingroup$ What was "the maintenance overhead"? Was it mainly policing spam posts (presumably from throwaway accounts)? $\endgroup$ – smci Apr 3 '19 at 13:38

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