@amWhy Thanks, I knew it wasn't the case.

@MartinR Your efforts here counted for something. I think Approach0 has made life so much easier in terms of finding duplicates, though. The trouble , for me is when there are very few equations involved and a lot of writing or diagrams. Thus, (slightly more than elementary) topology dupes are difficult to find , in my opinion.

Monitor this bountied low quality question

This question belongs to contest math and lacks , most importantly, a source.

@TheAmplitwist Just to update, the question Need example of a complex valued function which is uniformly continuous. has now been successfully closed.

@TeresaLisbon Yes, my focus is more on analysis, where you often have mathematical expressions of formulas, and Approach0 is a huge help there. Even more since you can combine search terms with logical operators (mostly: "AND") and restrict the results to MSE. Previously one often got many results on AoPS, in particular for contest-type inequality questions.

Btw, the extended query syntax of Approach0 is now documented with some examples in How to search on this site?

But Approach0 is not restrict to mathematical expressions, it also excepts textual search terms. I have no idea how useful that is in the area of topology. If you have a concrete example then you could post it in the In the search of a question chat room. The author of Approach0 is regularly present there and might have some tips for you.

HNQ that is both unclear and lacking effort.

@MartinR Interesting. I wouldn't have thought of topology specifically haha.

@MartinR This, I thankfully know and am delighted about it. I was concerned about topology , if I may say so, because I suspected a certain user was answering a lot of topology-based dupes. I don't think I used any heuristics, just organized Google searching, but it worked (reflected in said user's suspension).

D1, D2, D3, D4

D5, D6, D7, D8

D9

Two-psq question: math.stackexchange.com/q/4261742/29335

I suspect someone is posting questions using different accounts (judging by initial upvote counts on these: math.stackexchange.com/q/4261648/321264, math.stackexchange.com/q/4261653/321264, math.stackexchange.com/q/4261528/321264). All of these have been cross-posted on a sister site.

Please consider deletion

@StubbornAtom It seems to me to clearly be one person who owns at least three accounts, given their patterns of writing and voice. And likely means intervoting between the accounts @Xander ? Perhaps this would be better posted in the math mods' office chatroom? Please refer to the original message to which I replied, from @StubbornAtom.

@StubbornAtom @amWhy I'll have a look.

This is an old one, which was just bumped by a nonsensical answer. I have closed the question, but invite those with differing opinions to weigh in.

@XanderHenderson For that old question, the OP has acknowledged that the question is rather ill-posed in a comment to the accepted answer so I don't think they'll object to the closure of the question. Nor do I, for that matter :)

@XanderHenderson It's worth being closed, the question is of deletion now, perhaps.

Related discussion started here. I flagged 7 accounts, 4 of them deleted, one of them suspended. It seems no action is taken to the last two (where one of them is the OP of this).

@ArcticChar I noticed that you didn't contribute a delete-vote for any of your requests except D8 and maybe D11. Is there a reason?

@user21820 I am still voting on the delete request you posted two days ago here

@ArcticChar Oh I see. How many votes do you have?

5 LOL

Lol no wonder.

@ArcticChar What are the last two accounts?

@ArcticChar Thank you! | @Xander Please refer to @ArcticChar 's comments. You may have already dealt with this user, but more information is better, I hope!

@ArcticChar That's one of the questions linked by @StubbornAtom.

Welcome, @Prithubiswas! Do you have a question? If not, feel free to peruse this chatroom.

In need of closure

@XanderHenderson cannot be deleted although it is a very old not bountied question. Does a link prevent it ?

@amWhy It's already closed. Did you mean "deletion"?

@Peter Cannot be deleted until either negative enough score or a few days later.

@user21820 Likely that's what I meant. Now gone! Thanks

@user21820 3 reopen-votes although nothing can be added to the current answers.

@amWhy Did you edited my answer a min ago?

@user21820 One is the OP here. The other one is also deleted (so 5 of 7 accounts deleted). But I still have the username of that last deleted account, which is the same as this one. Note that this account has almost adjacent account no. with this one, which is the OP ...

of one of the post linked above.

So they don't even bother to think of another usernames.

How does such a a person create and interact far more than three accounts get away with antics like these, and go unnoticed so long by mods, and why, when discovered by diligent users, why does it take so long before anything is done about such accounts, and their continued creation?

@ArcticChar Thanks for all your information. I'd suggest we all start flagging posts resembling this MO. But I'm afraid mods are always 5 steps behind such accounts, not through faults of their own, but for lack of proper tools to root out such abusers.

@ArcticChar This (D9) links to a search result. Please advise.

@amWhy That's a mistake, please just ignore it.

@ArcticChar no problem; shall ignore. I address your other delete requests though. Thanks for your participation here.

@amWhy To be fair, the mods dealt with most (5 or 6 of 7) of the accounts I flagged last time.

@ArcticChar Yes, Please note that I know that the mods do everything they can; But also note:

@ArcticChar Our active site mods do an incredibly good job, given the limitations they have. I am being fair; mods need users and users need mods, and Xander has been doing an incredibly good job, and timely too, given the limitations even mods have.

Perhaps we all need to raise more questions at Meta.SE.

@ArcticChar I'll look into it. Though, again, it is often the case that there is little to be done---the is no policy against having multiple accounts, so long as those accounts are not used to get around other restrictions (e.g. sock puppet upvoting, or circumventing rate limitations).

Unless the violations are blatant, there is often little which can be done.

@XanderHenderson I think part of the difficulty is that "blatant" is hard to operationalize/ (define). But I understand that What is actionable by a mod, as "blatant", is far stricter in criteria, than what seems to be casually obvious or blatant to users.?

@amWhy "I think part of the difficulty is that "blatant" is hard to operationalize/ (define)" Yup. That is definitely a problem.

"What is actionable by a mod, as "blatant", is far stricter in criteria, than what seems to be casually obvious or blatant to users.?" Yes, that is typically true.

Just curious, @Xander, I imagine that when you were elected as a moderator, that you better understood the limitations of site moderators, and felt perhaps more limited in what you could accomplish as a mod?

@amWhy The SE overlords ask us to be pretty secretive about what we are actually capable of doing, and what we are not capable of doing. About the best answer I can give to that question is that the tools available to a moderator are somewhat more limited than I expected them to be.

@XanderHenderson Oops, did not mean to ask what you aren't at liberty to say. But I appreciate your not shutting me down. (not that you usually do!) :-)

Multiple PSQs in one question needs to be closed!

Good morning, I presume, @TeresaLisbon ? ;-)

@amWhy That's correct! The question above has just been closed.

@TeresaLisbon Thanks!

@amWhy I forgot to reply to you on the broadness issue of a few days ago (I think so) : yes, I agree with everything you said there. We can't expect people to be putting in six questions and only minimal effort for each part. My only trouble with this is that about two years ago I recalled writing one of my best answers to such a question, where I used the fact that the questions were stated together to link them better, and made the whole answer as one treatise. Sentiment.

I'll be more consistent on this in the future.

@TeresaLisbon There ought not be one rigid rule, but in general shy away from multipart questions. Another example where four or five statements may be related is when the question asks to prove equivalence of all. No problem! There are case by case examples, but as the question I linked immediately above, multipart questions can be abusive.

@amWhy You're definitely right. I'll be more skeptical when seeing such questions for sure.

Close

That's twice I posted the question that was a review audit.

!

Close

@TeresaLisbon I already encountered that in Review, and downvoted.

@amWhy Thanks. I could very briefly understand where the author was coming from, but it's still a PSQ.

I've also downvoted.