The question you're asking is designed to solicit opinions or best-practices on a particular topic, with the goal of reaching community consensus.
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21answers
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Official FAQ for Theoretical Computer Science
This is the official site FAQ for Theoretical Computer Science. This question will contain a list of questions, with each question linking to a single answer. If there is prior discussion on an ...
15
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12answers
1k views
How to ask a good question
The moderators spend considerable time on editing badly written questions. A possible way for reducing the number of badly written questions is writing down some guidelines (similar to the MO ...
15
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5answers
474 views
How will you cite a discussion on this site in your paper?
Should we just provide the link or write down the names of users whose responses were most useful?
8
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11answers
534 views
Material to supplement the FAQ
Since many of the visitors here are new to the Stackexchange environment, it might be useful to collect questions and answers here to add to the official site FAQ. In addition, it would be useful to ...
4
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2answers
453 views
Is there Really a Need for Theoretical Computer Science SE Site?
I thought the all QA here should be covered by mathoverflow.net?
12
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7answers
2k views
Is it ok to ask about the correctness of preprints on crank-friendly topics?
See this question in which someone asked for an update on the status of an arxiv preprint on graph isomorphism. It was downvoted, with a comment "Are this kind of discussions on-topic here? I think ...
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19answers
2k views
Is “theoretical” computer science too narrow?
The CS Theory Stack Exchange is humming along nicely. It's a terrific, robust, and growing community that is clearly making an increasing contribution to the state of CS Theory research.
Something we ...
19
votes
28answers
2k views
What should our site/domain name be? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline
Note:
We are closing this domain naming thread. It is asking the entirely wrong question. See this blog post for details: Domain ...
16
votes
16answers
755 views
Nominations for publicity poster at FOCS ?
Aaron Sterling had the nice suggestion (in comments here) for site promotion at FOCS: his idea was:
a poster with a few "best questions"
in large print on it: representatives
of
...
21
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4answers
425 views
Aggressive closing of questions?
I've recently noticed a troubling trend of "attacking" questions that seem to be too elementary. In some cases that is translated to closing a question, and in some cases the aggressive tone of the ...
29
votes
16answers
982 views
Original proofs generated on the parent site
Not a question, but I thought it would be a useful indexing tool to have a meta big-list of proofs whose first appearance "in the literature" was on this site.
Idea: each answer links to an answer on ...
16
votes
10answers
728 views
Beta period progress
We're currently two-thirds of the way through the beta period. As I understand it, the site will get shut down at the end of that period if it's not considered successful. This blog post says:
...
15
votes
5answers
221 views
How can we collaboratively investigate open problems?
This question builds on a comment of Shane's in a previous meta post on what can be achieved using a theory Q&A site.
I've spent a good deal of time on Jeff Erickson's lovely problem about ...
14
votes
7answers
570 views
Flood of homework questions
Is it just me, or is there a major burst of homework questions popping up ? Fall semester automata theory, anyone ? Unfortunately, we still have people answering questions instead of voting to close. ...
11
votes
13answers
1k views
What should our logo be?
Another one of the 7 essential meta questions- what should our logo look like?
Edit: This was originally a discussion both about the logo and about the theme, but now the theme has a separate ...
4
votes
3answers
120 views
Community Promotion Ads - 2013
As it is December 2012, we are now going to reset our Community Promotion Ads for the new year.
What are Community Promotion Ads?
Community Promotion Ads are community-vetted advertisements that ...
3
votes
3answers
187 views
Using at least one top level arXiv tag
MO advises the questioner to add at least one top level tag for his/her question:
Please try use at least one tag corresponding to an arXiv subject area (details about what each tag covers):
...
13
votes
2answers
168 views
Vote early and often!
[Below is Scott Morrison's post from tex.se, reproduced here because it's good advice we need to see early.]
I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is actually unsolicited advice, ...
9
votes
2answers
270 views
Are specific questions about Theorem X in paper Y fine?
See this question about an origami paper for example. It's a very specific question about a particular theorem the poster did not follow (or in this case the answer did not match that of the paper).
...
5
votes
2answers
284 views
Community Promotion Ads - 2012 [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Community Promotion Ads - 2013
We're hitting the start of the new year, and that means a new iteration of the Community Promotion Ads!
What in the Wide, Wide World of ...
3
votes
1answer
120 views
Official interim procedure for doing retagging.
Background.
For purpose of discussion, let A and B be tags, and let the goal be to convert B to A. There are two independent methods for doing this:
(Looking forward): Creating a tag synonym A ...
3
votes
1answer
134 views
Developing a CW policy.
In the discussion on this meta question, I made a comment in passing that I thought there were too many CW questions on the site at present.
While this may be a transient phenomenon while the site ...
7
votes
4answers
188 views
Highlights of cstheory.stackexchange.com
To promote this site, it would be useful to have a collection of our highlights. Hence this question:
What are the best technical questions that have been asked and answered on ...
13
votes
4answers
469 views
Promoting TCS.SE at FCRC
The last time we did an IRL (in real life) promotional event for TCS.SE was at FOCS 2010. I don't unfortunately have any data on whether that event worked to draw more people in. We also had the ...
11
votes
6answers
811 views
Promotion T-Shirt Design
According to the current discussion about the promotion of this site there come up the idea of a t-shirt with advertisement.
I want to collect some design ideas of a promotion t-shirt.
Edit: On a ...
9
votes
13answers
730 views
Who should the moderators be?
Update: This post is now closed since the temporary moderators have been selected. Please see this announcement for details.
Important: if you're nominated and accept the nomination, please add the ...
6
votes
14answers
647 views
Write an Elevator Pitch / Tagline
We closed the domain naming thread (click for details).
Instead, let's start with a killer "elevator pitch!" Joel will be blogging about the elevator pitch approach to naming, but to get you ...
4
votes
4answers
294 views
Does our name and domain name have to be the same?
This question came up while discussing this question. Since we've chosen our domain name to be cstheory.org, does this mean that our site's name will have to be cstheory? All the other SE sites I've ...
9
votes
2answers
230 views
Why was “All pairs shortest path in undirected and unweighted graphs” closed and migrated?
The question (which was "banished" to Math.SE) asks if there is a better solution to APSP than running BFS from each node. That is equivalent to asking if there is an algorithm that runs in less than ...
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votes
3answers
301 views
On the Feasibility of Homework Questions
Current policy is to close all questions that "feel like homework" to at least five (high-reputated) people. Those more militant even downvote answers given by others even if those were hints rather ...
18
votes
4answers
352 views
On using actual names
Over at MO, it's been asserted that one of the success stories in getting the site to work well is strenuous effort by the moderators to get people to use their real names when posting. I'm ...
7
votes
3answers
373 views
Should there be a protocol to notify authors if we find an error in a paper?
This question seems to have found an error in a computational geometry paper on CoRR, and David Eppstein in an answer confirmed the error. I haven't checked it myself, but I wanted to ask if we ...
6
votes
4answers
213 views
Are list questions such as about conferences on-topic?
We should decide whether to allow questions such as this one:
http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/386/complexity-theory-conferences
My feeling is that they should be on-topic as community ...
5
votes
2answers
155 views
machine learning vs learning theory vs both?
This has been bothering me for a bit -- we have a machine learning tag and a learning theory tag. Now given that this site is a theory site, every ML question should also be a Learning Theory ...
6
votes
7answers
867 views
Comment templates
This post is inspired by answers to this question and a similar list on TEX.SE.
The idea is to make a bunch of templates for commonly-used comments, like comments explaining that a question is out of ...
10
votes
7answers
401 views
How are we doing?
We are in our tenth day. We're coming up to the time that our moderators will be chosen. It seems like a good time to get opinions on how the site is progressing. Some questions that might help ...
9
votes
5answers
547 views
How-to-model-this questions
There are several questions asking for a good way to model something. Are they in scope, or should they be closed?
Because a recent example is “Semantic distance between excerpts of text.” by John ...
4
votes
3answers
348 views
What level and types of questions are appropriate for Theoretical Computer Science?
As a starting point, I was interested in András Salamon's answer to a question about the need for a TCS Stack Exchange.
Now, as a software engineer, there are a number of topics in theoretical ...
4
votes
7answers
293 views
How to promote the site?
As the site comes into public beta, we should start to consider how to promote it amongst the relevant communities.
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votes
8answers
572 views
Community blogging
The SE folks are providing the opportunity to create a community blog to showcase discussions on the site. They've outlined a number of steps that a community could take in order to get this going, ...
9
votes
3answers
215 views
The MO vs SO question
Over at the TeX SE site, there's been a fair amount of meta discussion about whether the site should be closer to the StackOverflow or MathOverflow model for discussions. The linked post has a good ...
8
votes
4answers
302 views
Should we re-open the debate on the name of the site?
The (domain) name is very important to the success of this site and a strong, witty one can sometimes be that extra hook to grab a new user, while a weak, boring one can put people off, alienate them, ...
7
votes
2answers
258 views
Why the extreme strictness on topic closing?
I'm curious as to why the moderators on this site are so zealous about closing topics that they perceive as off-topic, "not real questions," etc. There are many questions, and I count one or two of ...
1
vote
3answers
299 views
Our domain scope, specifically defined
There have been many independent questions about whether things are on/off-topic, but I think that we should be explicit at this point about our scope. The wikipedia article on TCS could provide a ...
12
votes
3answers
579 views
A cstheory website for beginners
It seems that overzealous folks at Area 51 closed the proposal without giving it a fair chance. (Dave Clarke)
--
mathoverflow.net is for mathematicians.
...
10
votes
2answers
220 views
Attacking Open Questions
In their latest blog post, the guys from tex.SE mention that they regularly hold events where they specificly sift through the list of open questions with the goal to answer as many of them as ...
8
votes
7answers
223 views
Meta-meta discussion, and voting conventions
Yes, this is a discussion about question on meta :)
We have a lot of discussion questions, but it's not always clear whether the discussion has congealed into an actual policy, or if people just got ...
7
votes
2answers
186 views
The number of questions and closed questions
After reading a post by user Gopi in the chat room, I wrote a query on Data Explorer which lists the number of questions posted in each month and the number of closed questions among them (although it ...
7
votes
8answers
754 views
Homework, or things that look like homework.
c.f this question on O() notation.
Stackoverflow actually has the 'homework' tag, and is willing to entertain questions of that kind. MO has strong prohibitions in place against it. The first ...
4
votes
2answers
126 views
What should the tag wikis contain?
I just edited some tag wikis to explain what the tag was for. I did it for tags like pcp and qma where it may not be clear what the acronyms stand for. So for example, for QMA, I explained what it ...
