CURED

Why don't we have a "Too narrow" close reason?

needs moderator action - bounty shields an off-topic question from closure - I wanted to close-vote as "needs more focus"

How about a little less drama, and a lot more "keeping on topic" in this room??

@user64742 No Math moderator has resigned since October 2018, although a few highly active users have left.

However, I, at least, find it hard to believe that there would be so many closely related questions, from one or several users, in such a relatively short time here if these questions are actually just from a past IB past paper.

You are not breaking rules by answering PSQs. But you are sending the message that "PSQs are entertained on this site, and will be answered" by answering them. So that's why we discourage answering of PSQs, @Euler2.

Instead of showing that a question was "Closed by [list of users]," why not indicate that the question was "Closed by members of the community because..."?

@BillDubuque Do you mean in an ethereal sense or in a practical sense? In an ethereal sense, you may have any interpretation of merit you wish, and we'd not gain much in discussing that. In a practical one, we both have earned that right in different ways and in different degrees.

@BillDubuque To the contrary, I could imagine many other reasons why a newer question might be a better dupe target than an older one, for example if the new question were stated better. In this case no such difference between the questions jumped out at me, in which case timestamp/popularity seems like a reasonable tiebreaker (especially since older/more popular questions probably rank higher in search engines). Was there some reason you had in mind?

@TeresaLisbon Yes, it seems that is a more current, alive, topic there than it is here; But there are advocates for term limits here, as well. I do think after serving a term, mods should have the option to run again, to be elected anew. I just don't like indefinite appointments, which often tern into only honorariums, or emeritus, but essentially inactive.

@XanderHenderson but in who they elect the community expresses its opinion. The moderators elections are the events where something resembling an actual vote happens. The will of the community over the last 5+ years was pretty consistent. Lets enact it.

@XanderHenderson First sentence is a comment on another answer. Second sentence is completely bogus (just look at the contrapositive of what Mauro used). Third sentence onwards is not only not-an-answer to the question but also pointless self-promotion.

@Xander I've never studied or taught anywhere in which "tutoring = doing others work for them".

@user64742 No. The question was not about just that one identity and Ramanujan's thinking. It explicitly stated Ramanujan's identity as an example of what the question was supposed to be about. That's why it's opinion-based. If it was merely about the history of that identity, then you would be correct that it is historical and hence for HSM SE rather than Math SE.

@Did I'm appalled.

@RRL The OP stated two problems, explained how to solve the first one, but displayed no effort concerning the second one. How is this essentially different from just stating the second problem and adding nothing else?

@Prithubiswas (1) it is very long, (2) it is not clear what your actual question is, and (3) at the end, you seem to be asking at least five questions.

There are so many posts of the form Hint: (full answer)

@TheGreatDuck I'm simply stating that when a contest question qualifies as a PSQ or NSQ, then sufficient context should apply to contest questions, as well as such questions without that tag. The tag contest-math should not privilege ones reception any more than had it been asked without that tag. Please, you need to tone down your personal attacks. In this most recent comment of you, you're wrong.

I still think that many users are still trapped in gamification and it needs a little bit more convincing to explain them our motivation.

@PedroTamaroff: if you participate in this room on regular basis (2,3 days per week), you will perhaps think differently about this room and its users.

@PedroTamaroff: many users of this room as well other reviewers too leave helpful comments for the questions they close. But only a small percent of askers respond with enthusiasm. Mostly such messages are ignored. Even the messages related to the new mathjax tutorial designed for beginners (which I often post in comments) is ignored.

@PedroTamaroff I don't think that being a career academic necessarily implies that one should be considered "trusted" on Math SE. These things are orthogonal, as the goals of academia and Math SE are not the same. It is like saying that a mathematician ought to be a good accountant, since accountancy is just numbers, right?

@PedroTamaroff Hah, look at all the "retired professors" who are eager to do others' homework for them. I think you are extremely selective and biased in what you report you see. Give me some time, as you've refused to thus far, to make explicit what you conveniently ignore. And I'm not convinced you're on this site much at all. You can't expect users hear to here your concerns, without being open and inviting to hear our concerns about

@HereToRelax Oh no. What is this edit monstrosity (Disclaimer: In my opinion, 5 to 10 edits should be enough, but almost 50??)

@PedroTamaroff Not asking for you to do so. But that was five years ago. How dare you come in and expect users to all just plain agree with you? Get real.

@PedroTamaroff If you looked closer you would learn that the linked questions on the abstract dupe target has 24 links including answers at all level explaining how to solve modular quadratics (by CRT). Your answer adds nothing at all new (and leaves much to be desired as for rigor)

@PedroTamaroff I am not sure why an upvoted answer is relevant. The question itself is +6/-11 (so quite negatively received---downvotes are far less common than upvotes, so a disparity like that is rather significant). I believe that there is a consensus that a good answer cannot save a poor question (though a great answer might---do you believe, aside from the HNQ induced upvoting, that the answer there is great?).

@Peter If you voted to close a question, and the question was closed and reopened, then it takes some time until you can close vote on the same question again. I don't remember the details, but you can probably find the information here:

It isn't a huge deal, and no one is being punished or chastised---I just want to re-emphasize the scrutiny that this room gets both from within the Math SE community, and from the larger SE network.

Bad content from users in the past shouldn't be held against them in the future. SE's policy has always been that we don't hold grudges and we give people the opportunity to reform. This is why there is no public record of suspensions once those suspensions has passed.

@Jorge That's already been very clear, and there a lot of us. You don't know us, are what each of us believes. We're not carbon copies of one another. It's equivalent to me saying "I don't agree with you guys that want to keep points from answering obvious poor quality question, and then hold it against those who point this out." It is okay for you to realize you can't answer everything and anything, and pout for awhile. I get it. It's not fun learning it is inappropriate to do much of

@TeresaLisbon This should be true for 80% of questions in most all elementary tags given that the site has been around a decade now. We've seen almost all exercises from most popular textbooks, and then some...

Please make edits to improve posts, not to bump them. Thanks!

So a user has written an answer which is not one, then complained about it getting deleted, got it undeleted and abused somebody in the process, and will now go and mutter somewhere else. This is an emotional matter : ONE SIMPLY CANNOT TAKE THE SITE FOR A RIDE LIKE THIS. I feel helpless in this matter.

@AlexanderGruber It is total gibberish. It calls ZF "craps", and claims that "Russell is the only mathematician I ever see that actually explains mathematics in a precise formal way", and makes the nonsensical assertion "There are also another proves that go against Gödel's theorem, such as Tarski's". You can check with @AndrésE.Caicedo or @CarlMummert for corroboration.

@Peter It's the same reason people get addicted to Cookie Clicker.

@ShubhrajitBhattacharya In fact I cannot see the purpose of this. Some people just like astronomical reps, who knows for what. That would not matter if this would not turn this site to something like a "do my homework" site. But as long nothing is done against this awful practice, they will continue as long as they are able to post answers here.

Imho unless a verification question includes a specific question about some step in the proof then it should be closed for lack of context. Too many of these are fishing expeditions which often lead to poor answers due to such (and are also fertile grounds for rep farmers to pick & choose trivial parts to answer)

Solution verification should be used only when the solution is included in the question. Else the verification is not solely about the question, but also the answer.

@user I didn't know that since they removed the solution-verification tag and self answered. Even in its prior version it is not a good question since verification questions should have context saying why they have doubts about the proof. *

@TeresaLisbon Yes, I get that. But remember, I've seen countless under 2000 users slave to suggest edits, so they can earn 2 points for each edit, and some take the easy way out. Again, the culprit is a system built on gaming, with rep. Fortunately, once one exceeds 2000, no more lolly-pop for editing. And almost all of them go from suggesting 15 edits a day, to none. :(

@soupless As amWhy suggests, use standard flags to mark a question as low-quality. This will send it to the review queues, and will not require moderator intervention.

@user21820 I have noticed that the synonymization of "question" with "doubt" seems common among people from India. It seems to be perfectly correct for Indian speakers of English, and (I think) should be regarded as a regionalism rather than something which is incorrect.

It is a recent trend, bucked by fascinations from YouTube, imaginative blogs that try to intuit, and intuitions from physics that get carried over wrongly (like the delta function). Yes, we must crack down on these posts more often. It would help if we had a small army of canonical duplicates, which I could not locate as a group on the duplicates post on meta. Perhaps I will collect a few good ones.

@Isabellatrix I'm sure that many things about the site are learned on the fly - just as on most sites - since users rarely read guidelines etc before diving in head first.

Once again in the case nobody noticed my post above : We should counter posts with the extended real line. It makes users think that $\infty$ IS a number with this trick and division by $0$ is meaningful. This is utterly wrong. Every time , $\infty$ ocuurs (no matter at which level), this nonsense is repeated again and again.

@ParamanandSingh New user, so I can't see much of a chance. To be fair, wasn't rude in the comments or anything, so no damage done at least. There's plenty of similar questions on the site, I'd think, so they can work with those.

@DRF that is rather rude to judge as you did in the first sentence. There's no truth behind the claim.

@user64742 @ellisaba You should be aware that your opinion that this is a "deceptive" practice is not entirely uncontroversial. Some folk believe that the goal of MSE is to create a shared repository of interesting and useful mathematical knowledge (in the form of Q&As). The original asker is far less important than the question itself.