24
Yes, this is the idea. As long as you have not reached 50 points, you can only do posts (questions and answers). An answer should be an actual answer to the questions; it can be a partial answer too, but it should be substantive.
The reason why you cannot tell users what is wrong with their work is that, as unfriendly as this may sound, "we" first want ...
19
I think the existing answer probably makes more sense to someone who's already familiar with how the site works, so let me try to explain the policy from a more abstract perspective:
This policy is meant to deter people who know absolutely nothing about math. If you belong here (which you obviously do), you'll accumulate the required reputation threshold ...
18
The privileges are tied to reputation, so if you offer a bounty and your reputation drops below a privilege threshold as a consequence, you lose the respective privilege until your reputation again rises above the threshold.
So if you offer a $50$-point bounty before you have at least $100$ reputation, you lose the "comment everywhere" privilege until your ...
17
I agree; there is much less need for new tags on an established math Q&A site than on a technology-oriented Q&A site. On a tech Q&A, users are likely to bring up questions about a new gadget or a new version of some software that was just released. Here we don't normally get questions about mathematical areas that were just recently ...
17
First, as a moderator I would not be too happy about vetting such applications.
Beyond just the added workload, there will be clearly good cases like yours, but then there will be other cases. Extrapolating from related experience, some will just not take "no" for an answer and this will be one more source of friction.
Second, as a user I would point out ...
16
The site is community moderated and most tasks can be performed by users with enough points. One of these tasks is to (soft) delete posts, to review these deletions and to undo them if needed.
To this end it is useful not to say necessary for those users to be able to see the deleted content, as explained in comments.
It thus makes sense to give access ...
14
Some questions, for reasons that are not always entirely clear, attract many "answers" that are not answers. Some of these could be additional questions. Some may be comments on existing answers. Some may simply say "Thanks!" Some may actually be spam (in the strict definition used by Stack Exchange).
When this happens it is often worthwhile to protect the ...
14
At 250 reputation, you earn the privilege to view and cast close/re-open votes on your own questions. The ability to vote to close/re-open others' questions is earned at 3000 reputation here.
13
The suspended user, she or he, cannot respond to comments. They have read-only access. They can see your comments, but cannot comment, nor can they edit any of their answers. They can do nothing except read what is on the site, until the suspension expires.
12
Some SE sites (for example the trilogy sites Stack Overflow, Super User and Server Fault) have actual advertisements, and an actual reduce ads privilege which disables the full-width ads which appear on these sites. Here's an example recently seen on Stack Overflow:
Mathematics Stack Exchange is not one of the SE sites which have these advertisements (...
12
The commenting privilege was debated ad infinitum at meta.SO, and proposals to lower the threshold were declined, declined, and declined again. Keep in mind that math.SE is not an independent site and the system of privileges is network-wide. It seems pointless to rehash the arguments here. Concerning the scenario you describe:
Anyone who later finds ...
12
After a quick check on this, we've increased the threshold to the suggested 1000 reputation. That seems a saner number than 1500 for here. Only a handful of tags are created in the 1000-1500 reputation range, many of which were things like conditional-probability and partial-derivative that are quite frequently used.
12
There was a recent change to the system that prevents the protecting of questions by 15K users unless additional criteria are met. From bluefeet's answer on Meta Stack Exchange (emphasis added):
15k users will still be able to protect but in order to do so the question must have at least one answer by a new user aka a user with < 10 rep on the site (...
12
To be clear, "MathJax" is a version of "TeX" or "LaTeX", which is the current professional standard for typesetting mathematics. It's a little goofy, but not so hard to learn for writing basic mathematical things. In any case, if you are wanting to pursue mathematics, being able to write/typeset things in this way is an absolute ...
11
First and foremost:
You are not alone feeling/thinking that on some occasions you would prefer only to cast an ordinary vote!
I don't think you can forsake the superpowers, but you can use them responsibly. I don't think there are any normative guidelines for this. Instead I list a few thoughts I recall having, and practices I have tried to implement.
...
10
There was a bug where a disabled privilege could still show up when congratulating you for earning one.
This has been fixed.
10
I know for a fact that you can cast delete votes (as you successfully helped to delete a question).
I guess that what you see is actually a side effect of intentional restrictions.
Namely, there are some restrictions on which posts you can vote to delete and the number of your delete votes is limited.
In particular, you can only vote to deleted ...
10
We already had users posting pornographic pictures, or stuff like that. I think that's a good enough reason.
At the very least require someone to add something of possible value to the site before adding something very terrible.
9
You have to remember something about the SE model. It is a for-profit private company. Their goal is essentially to be the #1 result in search engines whenever someone types something that ends with a question mark. For this, they need an army of unpaid volunteer, to ask questions, answer questions, edit questions, clean up the website and so on. The more ...
9
I think the reputation limit on comments is principally to prevent an overwhelming number of comments of this type:
great answer! btw have you seen this tip for quick weghtloss?? cheers mate
Edits to questions and answers bump the post to the top of the "active" list; people will see them and flag them quickly. Comments don't do that, and so can escape ...
9
Yes. You will have 27 points, which is not enough to comment everywhere, or post other bounties.
You can regain the reputation by posting more questions and more answers.
9
Privileges are, well, privileges you earn depending on the amount of reputation you have. As you earn more reputation, you will be able to do more with the site. At the early stages it's mainly about basic participation, but at higher levels the privileges are more moderation-centric. A complete list can be found in the Help Center: Privileges.
Badges are ...
9
This already exists, somewhat, in the form of an association bonus.
Essentially, if you earn 200 reputation on any Stack Exchange site, then each of your associated accounts on Stack Exchange sites will earn 100 reputation immediately. Even if you just create them! This is usually enough to get the basic privileges, such as
set bounties (usually 75 ...
8
A user can vote to delete a question when all of the following hold:
the users has at least 10.000 points.
the question is on-hold/closed since at least 48h.
the question is neither locked nor a duplicate target.
For users with at least 20.000 the 48h rule does not apply for questions with low score.
Nobody but moderators (including the community-user)...
8
Since you didn't lose any reputation due to deleted posts, the explanation is probably that somebody upvoted or accepted one of your answers, thus raising your reputation above the threshold for the comment privilege, triggering the notification, and a short while later reconsidered and withdrew the upvote/accept, letting your reputation drop back to 40.
...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible