CURED

@Peter Nonsense of the highest cardinality.

@Peter That user and that topic again?!? I voted as "not about math" because now it doesn't even have amusement value.

*Observations (my perspective, but seeking others' input) I seem to be seeing an increase in posts about how to enter the correct code for Matlab, GAP, R, or any number of CAS's, or questioning why their code isn't producing the correct result, etc. none of which are on topic on math.se, but quite a few get answered anyway.

@Dr.XanderHenderson I know it's off-topic for this room, but it seems congratulations are in order! Well done on passing the PhD!

Can we please stay within the topic of the chatroom?

@AlexanderGruber For the most part I am opposed to dry and homework-y threads. The reason is that such questions rarely add new content to the site. Admittedly I am also extremely annoyed by the fact that they create opportunities for the local gang of homework automatons to participate in their hourly circle-jerk of textbook answers and upvotes.

I think there's a good case to be made for raising close votes in our review queue to at least 30, (I'd prefer 40) when the number of posts exceeds 500.

The lack of action that can be taken is the problem, and this led to the outburst. If we could deal with such users with an iron fist then things would be much better. We need to set an example to reputed users that they are not untouchable if their contributions drop.

@BillDubuque That is a comment, not an answer. Problem solved. :\

@MattSamuel In the context of the question asked, are you going to argue that that any of that is relevant?

Request for y'all. I need help collecting examples of: crank questions, annoying duplicates (and associated duplicate targets), and PSQ red flag phrases (such as "i have no idea" or "urgent"). To prevent this from derailing the room, please discuss here.

which is a tidy little pretext for abuse

And, honestly, it doesn't take much: "I am trying to understand result [x] about 'complex dimensions'. Complex dimensions were introduced while studying the wave equation on sets with fractal boundaries, hence I expect that this question might be interesting to people who do analysis on fractals."

"work shown" is a form of context. it's not necessarily sufficient context.

Hey, "solve the Riemann Hypothesis, please" might be of interest globally, among mathematicians, in terms of their interest in the topic, but it makes a close and delete worthy PSQ

Call me doctor, 'cause I'm bout to CURE the site of all these PSQs

@amWhy: something weird is going on here. Many of the posts presented by @user64742 are not really worth closing.

@user64742 I don't understand why this should be closed..

FYI Wolfgang Muckenheim does seem to be back. I encourage folks to not feed the troll in infinity-crankery posts!

Of course, this poor behaviour is being enabled by a mid-rep user who should know better.

I think that there would be less desire to close and delete them quickly, if they were not answered before they were improved. In order to motivate people to improve their posts, I would say we need to avoid posting answers until the posts are improved.

@ZacharySelk OMG. If I still had my diamond powers, my finger would be twitching on a button locking MH's account and throwing the key away. That is beyond, well, anything I've seen on this site. Very sorry to hear about this.

In any event, that comment was a joke. The more salient point is that Math SE is not designed for conducting peer review. This is the wrong place to have people read over new results.

From the yesterday's discussion in this room you can see that there are differences of opinion in the mod team too over what happens in this chatroom.

@TeresaLisbon: hello! I think most of the high rep users know the issues. Some of them knowingly answer PSQs on routine basis. And they don't agree to the philosophy of CURED.

Wars of words begin when someone decide that they are egalitarian, and those who disagree with them are elitists with double-standards. Luckily, these things don't happen often.

I don't really want to see your messages calling out another user for something or another. That's not my problem, either.

It is sad when answers can be written more quickly than comments requesting clarification...

@Peter I think all non-serious attempts at Collatz (or any other crank magnet) should be closed.

FWIW, while we were busy pointing at the bounty shenanigans, The Poor Jew received 5 upvotes to 5 different posts in a span of 13 seconds. I flagged it, of course. Looks like the mods are investigating it. More recently, the other party put up a bounty on the same question. Leaving the rest to the mods.

@JohnOmielan Now closed with a more general dupe target

@user21820 Less talk. More work. Sounds good.

@XanderHenderson Perhaps it is time to think about enforcing stricter requirements on SV = solution verification questions since users are exploiting the lack of such to reopen dupes of FAQs, e.g. see Jose's comment here

Unfortunately, that isn't how SE works. We weed our gardens so that the weeds don't take over.

This site could be better, but the new users need to be educated about the norms, not given excuses to their juvenile expectations of instant gratification from a homework service.

@Bill You lost your diamond because you followed your private "Bill's way or highway policy".

@BillDubuque I find it fascinating that you complain about the hostility of this room (despite the fact that it is you who tosses around terms like "hare-brained"), then have the audacity to post a comment then intentionally edit it in order to append the provocative and semantically useless tag "The mind boggles..."

@BillDubuque A good way of dealing with this is to avoid assuming the intentions of others or accusing them of bias. Let's try to keep it objective in here so that the temperature of the conversation stays comfortable.

That's what one calls "no clue questions" and they should be closed.

@Strants The whole point of closing a question is to give the asker time to improve it before answerers jump the gun and provide answers which have the potential to be made irrelevant following edits. I am of the opinion that we should be quick to close, but also quick to reopen when improvements are made.

@Peter Can we please not make these kinds of accusations?

@darijgrinberg There are very few standard reasons for deleting an answer. "This answer is a link-only answer" is one of those few reasons. Link-only answers suffer from a lack of searchability, and become useless if the link eventually goes dead.

As a general reminder please try to avoid discussing individual users (especially in an unfavorable way). Focus on posts. For problems with users please raise the issue with us directly (by flags for example). [Such flags stay sometimes open for a while, but this does not mean that they were not noted.]

I personally don't care if these are reopened, but I'm more concerned about letting this behavior continue with these users going forward.

@ParamanandSingh I speak only for myself here, but I would not mind if a question like this was unilaterally closed by a moderator.

I'm a native English speaker, and I and some others here have found your tone not conducive to productive discussion. I do not wish to argue this point at all; perhaps you sound different online as compared to offline.

Whatever the case, I still think there is no reason you cannot post your answer to the better question and close the bad one as dupe. You can still do it even now with just a copy-paste. Then we get a good question with a good answer, rather than good-bad mixtures.

@user21820 Possibly you should comment on the answer saying this, rather than silently deleting it?

@Feeds I was not aware that mods could edit posts by the bot Feeds. It seems, at least to me, that this is an unnecessary edit, because the edit history is anyway accessible to everyone.

Be cautious when editing. Remember in this Holiday season to not drink and edit.