# Tag Info

55

You're lucky today. Some users upvoted a few of your better questions, and that was sufficient to lift the ban. For the time being, at least. But you are certainly still close to the ban-threshold, so asking a badly received question will probably reinstate the question ban. On the other hand, asking a well-received question will move you further away from ...

33

I don't really think that deleting your answers because no-one has reacted to them is the greatest use of your time, to be honest. There's little cost to the site to keep your answers available, and someone may come around later to whom they are helpful and who will provide you with some sort of feedback. And it does take some amount of your effort to ...

27

The efficacy is not accurately measured by the size of the Unanswered category. Yes, there are about 48K questions there, but only 34K actually have no answers. The rest have at least one answer, which in many cases fully deserves an upvote, but does not have one yet. And among the questions with no answers at all many received helpful comments; ...

24

Good tags for you might include algebra-precalculus. quadratics, trigonometry, calculus, matrices, and linear-algebra. Maybe you don't feel comfortable answering calculus or linear-algebra questions (or maybe you know more! It's hard to know). Each of these tags have a massive backlog of unanswered-but-reasonable questions that someone could provide good ...

21

I'd normally leave a comment under the question, asking the OP if they had read my answer, and if they have any troubles understanding it or need me to elaborate on some parts. If the OP hasn't been very active recently, I might skip that part. Sometimes I try to think what I can add, or some additional point I think is worth repeating, and edit those ...

19

You have several options: You can do your own research based on the information gained, to check what is correct and what is not correct. You can ask the authors for further clarification, as recommended by Gerry Myerson. You can consider circumstantial evidence to infer which of the two is more credible (author's reputation or score, the amount of ...

18

I'm not sure how helpful this will be, because I've never had much trouble finding places to put my votes. I think about half my interest in se.math is in answering questions and half is in reading other people's questions and answers. So I spend a lot of time browsing through questions and opening the ones that seem interesting. Often I see questions that ...

13

One point, if an answer appears entirely in comments, or if it just would be helpful to other readers to have all of the good parts from a comment thread in one place, anyone can post that as an answer after waiting a bit, then click on Community Wiki as part of editing in the answer. CW is always a choice for answers. That way, the full answer is readable, ...

9

If I am offering a bounty to attract attention to some question, I usually choose the lowest possible amount. There are several reasons why I do this. One of them is that there is already quite a lot of bounties and the question might remain unnoticed despite the bounty. In such case I would lose my reputation without gaining anything, except a few more ...

7

The abstract of the specific 1979 paper you asked about is written in French, so it would be helpful to identify whether "open access" is so much a barrier to discussion here as content written in a language other than English. I think Xander Henderson identified the generic difficulty to asking "more than one question" about a technical ...

6

It is definitely a judgement call - so various users might have various views on a specific question. One issue is whether you consider this a question about the inequality $$\frac{x}{y^3+2xyz} + \frac{y}{z^3+2xyz} + \frac{z}{x^3+2xyz} \gt \frac{15}{2} \tag{1}$$ or whether you consider this a question whether about the inequality xy^2+yz^2+zx^2 < \frac{...

6

In addition to @mixedmath's answer, using search terms is also super useful: a search query like this gets the most recent questions tagged with either (algebra-precalculus) or (trigonometry). You can additionally add answers:0 to get questions which haven't been answered, and/or hasaccepted:no to get questions for which no answer has been accepted. It's ...

5

Regarding your third bulleted question, for example, a search on the Mathematics Stack Exchange website for the word triplet "proposition theorem lemma" brings up some useful answers here, here, and here. (I omitted "corollary" because I think that everyone would agree that it's a result which relates to a particular theorem as a special case or immediate ...

4

It's most likely the case that any easy question (that is, of course, relative) is answered extremely fast and if you want a chance at answering it then you need to just have the site open so that you see brand new questions. It's unlikely that you'll find an easy question that is more than an hour (maybe a few hours) old. I say this because most questions ...

3

You should first try to find out why your question did not attract an answer. If the question is hard to understand or it seems that it would be next to impossible to give an answer that you would accept, then setting a bounty will not help. However, if the problem is that the expected answer will take above average effort to write down properly, then ...

2

For those with little experience in LaTeX, the best on-site source to consult is mathjax basic tutorial and quck reference. This site uses MathJax software and MathJax relies a lot on LaTeX commands (not all), surrounded by dollar-signs. The tutorial will help you get up to speed in no time. When I started here, I became very familiar with MathJax by ...

2

Having looked at the comments both here and on the related topic linked in the question: I think that "I have no clue where to start with this" has an immediate answer: Start by identifying what you're clueless about. But of course the questioner might have no clue how to do that either—but they could perfectly well be given (or pointed to) a checklist of ...

2

If it doesn't actually answer the question as posed: flag it as "not an answer". It might be moveable to a comment, otherwise it's screed that should be removed. Interesting screed, but screed nonetheless. If it only partially answers the question, or forms the basis of what a complete answer would need: comment on it and ask for an expanded explanation of ...

2

One of my questions has a number of good answers which I have not accepted. That's this question, which is a "Big List, Soft Question, Community Wiki" type - further contributions are welcome, but what would an accepted answer look like? I've up-voted all the answers I like, and there are 20 answers, all good - except that I haven't voted for my own answers. ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible