@amWhy and @user21820 I hope I did not misrepresent wat you said yesterday too much. If we really want this room to become active and useful, we should try to promote it a bit.

So maybe mention it occasionally in the main chat room. (In particular if a discussion about some specific question is going on - so that other users might join the discussion if they are interested.)

I tried to mention this chat room sometimes in meta when some question or answer was related to the topic of this room. But it seems that did not attract too much attention.

Some comments on meta mentioning this room can be found using this SEDE query.

It seems that all these questions are about continuity of $d \colon X\times X\to\mathbb R$ if $d$ is a metric on $X$.

Can some of them be closed as duplicates? (And what is the best duplicate target?) Can some of them be merged?

287285: How to prove the continuity of the metric function?

351359: Is the mapping $ d : X\times X \mapsto \mathbb {R} $ continuous?

1557642: Metric is continuous function

1934130: Continuity between metric d with respect to product topology

Maybe there are more - these are the ones I was able tof ind.

In 351359 the OP writes: "I want to prove it using sequential criteria." In the other ones I do not see restrictions.

Personally, I think that they even might be merged.

I have at least linked these questions to each other - I'll wait to see whether I get some feedback here in chat.

@MartinSleziak: No you didn't misrepresent me at all. I'm just cynical that this room will be an effective place to get help for closing/deleting bad posts, especially when it requires downvotes. After all, only users with 10k reputation can do it. It's a defect of the deletion criteria, but it's just too bad.

@MartinSleziak Indeed. I think the reason it doesn't attract attention is that when people (like myself) come here, they see a bunch of posts from SmokeDetector and no actual people, most of the time haha..

Ok, so perhaps a solution would be to raise awareness.

I understand you point that this room is not effective, but do you know of any other place which can be used for this purposes?

(I have strong feeling that we have talked about something like this before.)

Perhaps Constructive Feedback was recently used as a replacement for c.r.u.d.e.

I am not sure whether this is the way the room creator intended the room, but if it is for some reason better, we can let this room freeze and redirect SmokeDetector to that room.

However, this would probably make many mentions of this room on meta obsolete.

@MartinSleziak Currently, amWhy and SBA and I do it on our own in SBA's realm. We 3 suffice to deal with any bad posts that any 1 notices, except when it has too many upvotes.

Of course I don't see how Constructive Feedback is supposed to replace this room. But perhaps they could be merged.

Some time ago, many people frequented this room. If you look back in the transcript, you can find quite a lot of messages in 2015, perhaps also in 2014. It was frozen in 2013 and in 2012, but it used to have some activity before that.

@user21820 I doubt there is some mechanism for merging room.

I don't mean literally merging, but rather just expanding this room's scope to include feedback, and directing people from Constructive Feedback over here.

Then the original meta links stay valid and this room gets more related activity.

Which seems to me a reasonable option.

As for historical activity in 2015, it seems a lot was from SmokeDetector and Normal.

Normal was an outlier.

(And yourself of course).

You can find many messages by Najib Idrissi, apnorton, quid, t.b. IIRC. (I would have to look through transcript to be sure.)

@user21820 I should probably leave this room and let it to new owners anyway.

Yea there are a couple from those you mentioned. But not very often.

And you know that a good number of users is necessary but not sufficient.

There can be 100 users but none of them being both able and willing to help with deleting bad posts.

BTW SBA's realm is less visible to other users - I am not sure whether you consider this advantage or disadvantage.

@MartinSleziak Heheh. I think you have an idea of what I'm thinking.

That it's an advantage?

If you prefer other users not to know about your activities, then discussing how to attract more users was probably contraproductive.

You see, I don't mind if many users are supportive of cleaning up Math SE for the sake of quality.

But if only a few are, and the rest are unsupportive or even reactive, then it's not so nice.

I can readily justify in detail every action I do, but cranks never agree.

Ok. Since it was amWhy who suggested that you move to this room, you should probably let her know if you prefer not to do that and you want to use some other room.

@MartinSleziak: It's okay. I'll just see how it goes. Thanks for making us owners here anyway.

@MartinSleziak This and the next one are what I consider bad questions that should be closed as lacking context/effort. The first is fine and the fourth merely asks for a hint.

I posted them mainly as a suggestion for duplicates.

@user21820 It always seems to me a bit unfair when old posts are closed by criteria which came much later after they were posted. But perhaps that is the way to go.

There was some discussion on meta about this, wasn't it?

Probably I remembered this one: Why close old questions with accepted answers using the “no context” reason?

@user21820 I have added duplicate close vote there. We will see what happens in the reviews.

Later I will probably flag for merging. (Unless the feedback from this room convinces me that it's not a good idea.)

@MartinSleziak It seems the community closed and deleted that question in the end. And I agree with it.

The reasons for closing have always been there.

Just the people upholding them have not.

@user21820 I am not sure which question you have in mind when you say that community closed and deleted it.

I followed the link you provided, which mentioned in its opening paragraph a particular post.

If some consensus about some specific issue was made on meta, that's for me more relevant than what happened in some particular instance.

There was consensus.

For example, if the community decided in discussion on meta that (homework) tag should no longer be used, if some user recreates the tag, that does not mean that the previous consensus has changed.

The top-voted answer reflects it.

At least, the consensus of those who go to Meta.

By the way, I have been around since nearly the beginning of Math SE, and I know for sure the closure reasons have been pretty much the same.

Even the tooltip that popups up when you mouse-over the voting buttons says the same thing; "downvote" for "does not show any research effort; unclear or not useful".

So it's fair to downvote any question that does not show any research effort, regardless of when it was posted.

BTW as a room owner you can add (or remove) users to (from) the list of room owners. For example, if you want to add Simply.

Yup that's a good idea.

It seems that missing context was added in 2013: Two announcements: new “FAQ” and new “closure rules”.

@MartinSleziak: Thanks for finding that, but it doesn't really lend support to any hypothesis, since the last paragraph even says:

> It appears that at roll-out, there is already a specific "off-topic" closure reason for "homework questions". This creates a certain overlap with this proposed reason above. Please comment below with your thoughts.

Which "homework questions" closure reason we certainly don't have now.

Anyway, let's get back to testing out the efficacy of the CRUDE chat-room. =P

This post needs to be downvoted and deleted because it is not an answer (despite dispute of a few reviewers); it does not explain why the natural logarithm is special over all other logarithms with other bases.

@MartinSleziak: I just had an idea. If the active participants in CRUDE are owners, we can use the stars to highlight the posts that need attention, and then drop stars when they are completed.

Here is link to the low quality review which is available from the timeline.

Some time ago that used to be system here:

@user21820 I will add that room owner can even pin messages to the starboard (so that they are on top) and - as you mentioned - they can remove stars.

@MartinSleziak I am aware of the failed review; I'm the one who flagged first and was disappointed that it failed.

@MartinSleziak So let's try it then!

@user21820 Still, it saves time for others to have the timeline and review here - in case they want to check what happened with the post so far.

This answer is a crank answer and needs deletion (like the other deleted answers from the same user).

@user21820 Unfortunately, I had already voted to delete the answer you link above.

@amWhy: Yeap I guessed so, and I think you even mentioned so, but there are so many that I can't recall, nor can we tell who's voted on a post until it's done.

@MartinSleziak As of now, I'd like to frequent this room, and help bring it to life, like it had been; I mean that we need participation of users here, in order to be most effective. I do think your idea (posted on meta), that of making a list of the chatrooms on MSE, would help in that respect.

I think that by using this chatroom, it makes more transparent requests for action; which is a good thing.

@MartinSleziak, @DanielFischer Is it possible for me to talk with you privately

:39031161 I prematurely hit "enter"

@amWhy AFAIK only mods can create private rooms.

I guess you have talked in a "secret" room with Daniel Fischer before. (At least I have vague recollection that you requested something like that either here or in the Mods' office. Or was it another user?)

@MartinSleziak I think it was in the mods office, last year spring, I asked that. Yes it went quite well; however I'm guessing that room has long since vanished?

Yes, I am just answering "on my behalf". I do not have any means to create a private chat room with you or communicate in some way privately.

I'm not in any hurry, and I can certainly wait until @DanielFischer has enough mod time, say, 10 minutes, and of course, whether he thinks it's not a good idea.

@MartinSleziak Not a problem.

@user21820 It is deleted now. I have removed pin/star.

@MartinSleziak Thanks!

hello guys can we ask questions on this chat,

About close/reopen/undelete/delete/edit, sure. There are various other chat-rooms for math-related discussion.

oh i got it thanks

This and this and this are useless and best gotten rid of.

Hi, @SimplyBeautifulArt, You username sounds familiar; have we chatted before? :P

@amWhy Not sure :-)

@user21820 @amWhy Dupe: math.stackexchange.com/questions/2372466/…

duplicates Is the fact that the OP explicitly asks only for hints enough to consider the questions different? 1493627: Find general form for summation expression: $\sum_{k=0}^n {n\choose k}(-1)^k\frac{1}{k+1}$ and 38623: How to prove $\sum\limits_{r=0}^n \frac{(-1)^r}{r+1}\binom{n}{r} = \frac1{n+1}$?

@MartinSleziak I think it does make a difference, e.g., in the first link; when it's explicit an asker is simply looking for a hint/nudge in the right direction (to get unstuck and consider the hints and willing to work using those hints. With respect to your second link, I'm at 55:no close / 45 close. In particular I mention the uncertainty because I've seen far to many questions: "Any suggestions or solutions?" which, if they receive answers, tend to only accept a full-solution answer.

Also, in the first link, the emphasis on needing a hint, users are more apt to down-vote any answer which presents a full solution.

I have retracted my duplicate close vote on that one.