# Tag Info

61

39

It's... uh... been a while since this request was made. We require a few things before turning a switch like this - it's pretty harmful to small sites to have what is a large chunk of potential askers to be blocked. But... Maths isn't a small site, and it hasn't been one for a loooong time. So when this request was first passed into my radar two years ago, ...

35

You can experiment with the CD environment by including $\require{AMScd}$ in your post, and then using \begin{CD}...\end{CD}, as below. Here is an example using CD:$\require{AMScd}$ \begin{CD} A @>a>> B\\@VVbV @VVcV\\ C @>d>> D \end{CD}

30

Its days are numbered, starting today. You've voted, and while a little controversial, we'll support your decision. What remains is just the 'final arrangements', so to say. We'll need some preemptive cleanup Things with the homework tag applied to them do tend to have some issues. Take a stroll to the end of the very long tail - use your flags and close ...

27

Please do not vote down this answer. Please vote this up if you think that blacklisting the number tag is a good idea.

26

Yes, I think this is both reasonable on general grounds and will help to ameliorate some "site flooding" issues we are currently experiencing. Are the exact numbers of 6 per day and 50 per month negotiable, or is it an on/off situation? To me 6 questions per day sounds quite reasonable, but 50 per month is small in comparison. It seems to allow users to ...

24

Ok, there's a warning now: This is triggered by a title matching ^.{0,30}(^|\W)(anyone|difficult|doubt|easy|hard|help|interesting|please|problem|query|question|someone|stuck|very)(\W|$).{0,30}$ ...so it heavily favors short titles - Tricky integration/functions problem would've warned, while Least squares problem equivalent to solving Poisson problem for ...

24

Totally agree, and should have done something about this a while ago. To this end, I additionally propose making a new custom close reason: Seeking personal advice. Questions about choosing a course, academic program, career path, etc. are off-topic. Such questions should be directed to those employed by the institution in question, or other qualified ...

23

I think this comes back to the fundamental question of how people here envision the purpose of this site, and if the history of such debates is any indication, addressing the issue will lead to acrimony, drama, accusations, frustration, and other uncivil behavior on the part of certain individuals...over what I would like to remind people is ultimately just ...

22

As Mariano points out, this has been reported before. Because of that conversation, MathJax v2.0 includes an extension (the begingroup extension) that would allow you to isolate the effects of \def, \newcommand, etc. to a single question, answer, or comment, but it would require changes to the SE code to force that to be used. The changes would be to ...

21

We have enabled the 6/day, 50/month limits. Ideally we'd like to keep those numbers to avoid too many special cases throughout the network, but if they do turn out to be problematic, we can revisit this discussion.

20

It pains me to break this thread by fixing the issue, but here we are. :) We are now inserting \begingroup and \endgroup directives into post and comment bodies, so all command definitions should be scoped to individual posts. For now, I'm only enabling this on Math (and here on meta), but barring any issues this change will go live on all MathJax-enabled ...

19

I think this would be a very good feature. It happens to me too often that rejecting an edit is already too late - it was approved by other users. Even though there were much more obvious issues to address than removing a tag or adding two dollar signs. An example from a couple of hours ago: an edit changed "Leibnitz" to "Liebnitz" and was quickly approved....

17

Sorry about being late to weigh in - I was busy last weekend. Why I support this feature-request? The norm re context that we have developed means that new questions at varying levels of mathematical sophistication often get put on hold for falling short of that standard. That is all well. But, the fact that the message This question is missing context or ...

16

I don't have much to say about what is going to happen. But I do want to point out something about what is going on. This point was sorta brought up by another user, but the answer was deleted. There are people currently removing the homework tag manually from questions. But I have seen some users removing it from "famous" questions which are old, and ...

15

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 ...

15

Ok - this check now only fires if at least 30 all-uppercase characters are entered for a post body, 15 for a post title.

13

I have figured out both the problem with the \limits macro and with the failure to process the rest of the mathematics that it caused. It is basically as I outlined in my comment on @Zev's answer. The TeX input jax had an internal failure (it tried to use a null pointer), and that was trapped by MathJax as it was supposed to be. But it also meant that the ...

13

Unfortunately, while Math.SE is certainly one of the busier sites in the network, its daily activity levels are not yet at the point where it makes sense to switch over to the Interesting tab my default. You can read the details of the algorithm that powers that tab here. The most relevant part, however, is that it looks at the last 3,000 questions. This ...

13

Exactly how many active users do we have? I would suggest that 156 is a tiny fraction. I've been an active user of the site for a couple of years and had no idea that this discussion was taking place. I find it questionable that a discussion with a different web address (meta) can impact on the ordinary site. It seems a little like me getting a few of my ...

13

A quick note. We know what's going on, it's a change which had some side effects. I'll take a stab very soon. Update: It looks better now, as you need 60 consecutive unbroken characters to replicate instead of 20. However, it's not finished. Tomorrow I'll simply disable the line breaking shenanigans for comments that have MathJax in them. Update: this is ...

12

Thanks to Aryabhata, who solved the mystery in a comment: All four questions were asked by user7815, and that account no longer exists. That's unlikely to be a coincidence, so it seems that reputation is indeed deducted when an account is deleted. Now I'm just surprised that that doesn't happen more often. I guess account deletion must be quite a rare event. ...

12

What notation and symbols are commonly used here? Many posts at Mathematics Stack Exchange include mathematical notation, written using $\mathrm\LaTeX$ commands surrounded by dollar signs. If you see dollar signs with what appears to be gibberish between them, it just means that MathJax, the math rendering we use, isn't working properly for you. There are ...

12

OK, this was a fun one. Thanks for bringing it to our attention! I've modified the display of usernames in Post status blocks and revision history to prevent this odd display. An additional change was made to the revision dropdown: the new format is username - time - comments. This will be live in the next release (> rev 2014.7.2.1690).

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 (...

11

I took a quick look at how macro definitions are implemented in MathJax, and from what I can tell, this is a MathJax bug, or rather, a missing feature. In fact, there are two features that would make the way we use MathJax work better: Some way to reset TeX macro definitions (and ideally any other mutable state) back to its previous state after a Typeset ...

11

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.

11

This is live; I went with a variation on Normal Human's proposed guidance: To improve the chances of your question getting an answer, make sure that it: Uses MathJax formatting for math formulas Has an interesting, specific title that summarizes the question Describes what you know and what you don't understand (don't just copy a textbook problem!)Here are ...

11

So... Yesterday, Jon Arndt found an obscure bug over on Super User: Normally, when looking at tag information, at the bottom of the screen, there is a button labeled "Edit Tag Info". However, when looking at [the slackware tag] today, there is no way to suggest edits. ... Turns out what happened here was that the original wiki was suggested ...

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