clicked around but couldnt figure out who is behind it.
might have seen that guy complaining around se... there was a guy complaining very loudly about the failure of theoretical physics se... saw a meta post by him somewhere....
wonder where they got the software....
also, the legality of importing se questions/answers seems murky...
they are also trying to link id's to se id's somehow but dont see how that can be done exactly without se cooperation.
am presuming they are totally unaffiliated with se...
because of the importing, will be tricky/difficult to figure out how much traffic is really going on the site...
think the general idea of an advanced physics site is worthwhile but maybe the audience is much smaller than say mathematicians... so, difficult to achieve a community...
on other hand cstheory.se is a fairly small community & it generally works out...
& failure of theoretical physics se awhile back does not bode well for that site...
@vzn yes, there were a couple of people complaining about the failure of TP.SE and what they perceived as inappropriate moderation on this site, who are behind that site. I don't know what software they are using but there are several free SE clones out there.
The legality of importing questions and answers is not murky, though; it's explicitly allowed (given sufficient attribution) by the Creative Commons license. They're required to link to the original posts and user profile pages on the SE site they got the content from.
@vzn I think the site looks OK, but not as professional looking or as organized as Physics Stack Exchange. The fact that there seems to be only three active people on there in the private beta doesn't bode well for its future. Plus their moderators have been suspended on here in the past lol.
@KyleKanos you could ask for your profile to be removed by posting a question on their meta.
@KyleKanos I think the Creative Commons license has a part about users having the right to request anonymization of their content. You can't remove the content itself, but you should be able to have your name removed from it. I'm not sure how strong this clause is, and if you can actually force them to remove your name, you'd need a laywer for that.
> If You create a Collection, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collection any credit as required by Section 4(c), as requested.
I know that SE honors requests to remove attributions, I just never looked deep enough into the licence to check if they are actually required to do so
@hwlau Dilaton and Dimension10 seem to be the main driving force behind its creation, with a retired computer scientist doing most of the modification of the Q2A open software via plugins etc. The private beta has been going on since January, with only Ron Maimon, and possibly one or two others joining. It could work if they manage to get just one or two academics to consistently post there at the start.
@vzn there was a tug of war at the start of the creation of PSE with some wanting it to become like mathoverflow, and others wanting it to become like math stack exchange
@vzn physicsoverflow is meant to be the physics equivalent of math overflow. It's meant to resurrect the failed TP.SE, but without the pressure to succeed
however, do want to express some agreement with ... disadvantages of the se model eg in general & wrt scientific communication.
saw this comment on motls post:
> Well, am going to leave the entire SE network... tired of the whole opinion over science thing going on several sites. Any wonder many academics that I know do not regard SE as a viable scientific site —"H"
@vzn any physics equivalent of math overflow will always have problems with numbers, because physics isn't as popular as maths. When the theoretical physics site failed, they were getting roughly 1 question/2 days
it will be hard to beat se software which is highly finetuned/evolved, but it seems not controversial to consider that it might not be "best fit" for all kinds of (diverse) communities...
