CURED

It should be given a biscuit.

Of interest to this room: the definition of "spam" now includes "unsolicited", and not just "without disclosing affiliation". I have declined a lot of spam flags because they don't meet the old definition. The new definition is a great improvement.

@Jakobian And not even that, really. The question is about a problem in queuing theory. The problem comes from a paper which seeks to determine if ChatGPT could pass a particular exam. The references to GPT are third-hand, and are really only there to place the problem in the context of the paper in which it appears. I don't see a problem with this...

(The question certainly lacks context, and simply being "enticing" to another mathematician is not necessarily good enough... I really wish we just had a "no homework" policy, which would allow questions like that, but weed out 90% of the crap that gets posted.)

This question seems not to meet the standards for the site. Instead of answering it, why not look for a good duplicate target, or help the user by posting comments suggesting improvements? Please also read the [meta announcement](https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/33508/) regarding quality standards.

@XanderHenderson No, we have no such rule against similar answers. On the other hand, I have been noticing, for a long time, that we usually demand more from a new answer to an old question than we demand from new answers to recent questions.

And if that is @JoséCarlosSantos's justification, then that would have been a much better comment than "What are you adding?"

C (It's this "Is Useful?" guy again).

@user64742 There are PSQs asked by users with 2K rep, 5k rep, 8k rep. Please, until you deal with your biased assumptions, to not recommend post closures here. If you want to post one or two in a day, then along with your link, explain what you see the problem as. Being a new user is not equivalent to being a troll.

Wait. The person reposted the question twice afterwards. Nevermind

Anyways, you really ought to try following the advice in the comments - if you improve your notation, the proof is immediately clear. I don't think there's much to be gained by undeleting your question, so I'm not going to vote to undelete it.

@Peter I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. There's a lot of moderation work to be done on this site, and asking the mods to intervene in every case of a bad question is too much work - that's why we have things like this room.

@Shaun This time I agree and voted to reopen

@Feeds At least this time a claimed DISPROVE of the Riemann hypothesis :) - one more delete-vote needed.

Let's keep stars to more of a minimum. I.e., save stars for use on posts that have lasting value, rather than treating them like comment upvotes.

@PedroTamaroff I have not been doing that, dear @PedroTamaroff I follow posts (questions) coming up in the review queue, that are PSQs and/or Very Low Quality: then I click on those posts, to comment to the answerers. It's NOT MY FAULT that a half dozen users answer 70% of the posts on MSE that are PSQs and VLQ posts. Please spend more time chasing the answering abusers, instead of punishing users like me who click on a post in review if and only if it's very poor. You have been behaving far more

@Shaun I understand the misfortune. And the comment on the mathematics chat seemed dismissive. I certainly don't think your concern should be dismissed. Perhaps consider a post on meta, and/or consulting with a mod for tips on doing so?

Here are some old closed questions I'm nominating for deletion: 1 2 3

@XanderHenderson The question has 41 revisions now, and it seems to me that since revision 16 or so, only meta information has been added (complaints about moderation, examples of other self-answered questions, ...). But a rollback would bump the question again ...

We seem to have a spammer/sockpuppeter from CSSE: math.stackexchange.com/questions/4617874/… (see cs.stackexchange.com/users/156775/johnaaanny)

@BillDubuque Far more mathematicians stay away from MSE due to its image as a homework mill. Whenever MSE has come up in conversation with mathematicians I've met out in the wild, the conversation has always centered around cheating. Combatting this image through PSQ reform is the most important thing we can do to bring new talent to the site.

Just my two cents on the Gaussian prime question. Closure due to lack of context seems appropriate here. However the comment by Pedro on that question seems more constructive as compared to Peter's (I think that comment was in response to Mariano's observation. Having said all that I have closed the question for now.

@XanderHenderson Best of luck with the position. If nothing else, it really seems to validate that a good deal of the voting portion of the community understands this room is not a bad thing (since they know you are active here.)

@XanderHenderson Did you see the recent discussion among MO and MSE mods - it was initiated in the mods' office and continued in some private room - not visible to regular users.

@XanderHenderson Disappointing undeletion. Anyone can help? CC @Ѕᴀᴀᴅ @RRL @JoséCarlosSantos @KReiser

The site could be greatly enriched if many users stopped wasting time answering the same routine exercises ad infinitum and instead spent time organizing the site by adding such links. But, alas, SE gamification doesn't reward such organizational effort so such effort is rare.

@Peter I agree with @Xander There is nothing wrong with that question about infinitesimals. You seem to have a strong bias against nonstandard analysis. Why? It is quite beautiful and one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century.

@RithikKapoor that's a well-known issue, and certainly @amWhy is not unaware that some think or pretend that it is gender-neutral. When a user tells one they do not want to be subsumed under "guys," one accepts it and does not start a debate over it.

Wrong site to ask

I will also point out that "guy" is understood to be gendered by a significant portion of the English speaking world, and that you might want to avoid gendered descriptions of unknown people.

The real problem with the question (like many solution verification questions) is that there can not much be said apart from “Yes, that is correct” – and that alone is not worth an answer.

@Peter Closed, open for deletion. What a lame answer. Why do some people feel the need to answer anything/everything posted. If a cockroach appeared as an image, with no text in the body of the question, it would likely be answered! >:-[

close A PSQ; a high rep. user answering while also engaging in enforcement of rules (close/delete and the lot).

@Peter Regarding the oft used "CD": I'm thinking we should first focus on the C; if closed, it might spur corrections by the OP. If so, no need for "D". If not, only then add the request to D. Not all questions need deletion, asap, right?

Or we flag it and hope that some moderator soon reacts.

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution may be marginally enlightening: there is an old guard. Some of these folk are never going to change, no matter how much we ask them to. They will eventually either decide that they don't want to participate here any longer, or they will be given long term suspensions. But it will likely be a few more months before that starts to become really apparent.

Just a reminder to everyone: spam flags should only be used to indicate that a post advertises a product or service without the author of that post disclosing their affiliation with that product or service. If someone claims to have resolved Collatz and links to their own work, that is not spam. It is off-topic, it should be closed, but it is not spam.

@Peter ^^^ but it is surely a dupe so it should not have been answered.

@Peter This is probably the same person as well

@PedroTamaroff Thank you for this explanation. For me, the phrase "If you encounter a user who consistently answers low-quality questions over a significant period of time, and polite references to this post do not seem to be helping, [...]" suggests that it would be helpful if I remember which users where the offenders, but I should not systematically go through a users answers so I can comment on all their faulty answers. Is my understanding correct here?

@Ѕᴀᴀᴅ I think that happens if you choose “Share feedback” in the “First questions” review queue. There is a “Share feedback as yourself” checkbox, but by default the generated comment is attributed to the Community Bot.

@user64742 Closing questions for being unanswered is definitely not permissible. Sorry.

General reminder: please do not delete requests in the meta page for requests for reopen or undeletion. This has been stated policy since I created that page many years ago, and it is still being enforced by current mods.

@PedroTamaroff (3) I'm not sure that I like conflating "trusted user" with "high XP user". I know that the software does this, but I don't think that the amount of reputation a user has earned here should automatically be correlated with "trust", as the activities required to earn reputation are orthogonal to the activities which improve the overall quality of the site.

This argues for quickly closing such questions, and not reopening them simply because someone provided an answer before it was closed.

All of this is spelled out in the "How to ask a good question" thread, which is linked when a question is closed for lacking context. After a question is closed, the asker is given access to appropriate resources.

Finding real troublemakers and monitoring them to ensure quality on SE is different from making speculations and rumors about users. If you see users who are consistently contributing negatively to the site, you should flag their posts that are detrimental to the community so that moderators can take a look at the user and keep track of them if needed.

That is, it is too easy to accidentally retract a deletion vote.

Even better in terms of optics, at least, is if a moderator had also clarified (in broad terms) why their intervention was found necessary. You're of course free to ignore any and all of my recommendations, but I hope you (the collective "you") can also see how some of your own actions can be viewed from the outside as being conspiratorial.