This sandbox is intended for saving drafts of long, complex posts, especially posts whose composition takes a long time. It serves to localize to one thread the front-page "bumps" caused by edits to drafts of such posts, so that they may be easily ignored. Also, it helps to guard against losing longly-composed posts due to system crashes.
When you are happy with your draft here, you may simply copy the code and paste it to the desired location.
Proper Use of the Sandbox
Do not post a new answer!
We wish all the answers on this page to be owned by the Community user (so that only a non-sentient bot is informed of edits to these answers). Posting a new answer will make you the owner, meaning that you will be notified whenever another user makes an edit to that answer.The sandbox has been "wiki locked" to prevent the creation of new answers. There are more than enough existing answers for users to edit over, and this will greatly reduce the frequency at which we request that the answers be disassociated from specific users.
Do not delete answers! Deleting seems like a reasonable option, but there are no "hard deletions" on Stack Exchange, and users with sufficient privileges will still see your supposedly deleted postings. Deleted answers will be undeleted and cleared for the use of others.
Do look for an answer which indicates that it is free and then edit it to your heart's content. If none appears available, take over the one that has been left unchanged the longest (which will appear at the bottom of the page if you order answers by "activity").
Do not expect your draft to remain untouched for days. There are no guarantees that your draft will be the latest revision if you return days later. While users will try not to step over others' toes, it may happen that an unfinished draft is edited out. Your draft will, however, still exist as a revision of the answer it was made in. If your drafting is expected to take place over a longer period of time, either
- take note of the URL of the answer provided by clicking the
sharebutton, or- save a copy of your draft locally (or even "in the cloud").
Do clear your draft when you are finished. This includes removing all $\LaTeX$ from your answers. Replacing all code with a simple statement like
This answer is free for anyone to useis sufficient. Periodically users may go through and free up answer slots that have not been edited in, say, over one month. But you can aid in the smooth running of this sandbox by clearing away your drafts when you are finished with them.
Do not "claim" multiple answers concurrently. Since this post is closed, the answers are a limited resource. If you really must compose several long, complex posts at the same time, you can still use a single answer, separating the different drafts using Markup: horizontal rules (
---) and/or headings (# Header 1 #) are natural choices.Do not create new such sandboxes. The point of having a unique such sandbox is that it minimizes the noise on the front page when the sandbox is edited. If there were multiple sandboxes they will frequently occupy numerous front page slots, pushing other topics off the front page, and increasing noise.
