User:Tbenshachar/sandbox

There are currently 21,502 visitors to the site, mostly in the United States (35%), India (12%), and the United Kingdom (6%). About 3,000 of the users are active. There are 17,380 questions. It takes an average of 3.9 hours and a median of 1.4 hours to get an answer, and an average of 5.01 and a media of 2.21 to get an "acceptable" answer.

MathOverflow encourages use of real name. The site users google and yahoo's OpenID to sign in, however you can still answer and post questions as an anonymous (logged out) user. Badges are used mostly to help get a new user to figure out how to use the site. You can increase a user's reputation, which gives them more abilities in the site. Every user starts out with no reputation, and the only way to increase a user's reputation is by another user. With enough reputation you become a site moderator, can retag questions, and edit questions and answers.

Mathjax is now used in the site to transform math equations into their appropriate form. It supports most of the LaTex library, so posting anything in between $'s will translate into proper mathematical notation.

Interesting operations of the site: Mark tags as interesting/ignored, see original markup of math used, specific search throughout the site, use boolean operators on tags. (See http://mathoverflow.net/tips).

MathOverflow is very specific about what you can/should post. They have a meta site, http://meta.mathoverflow.net/. This is used to talk about the site, report bugs, post comments/suggestions, Quotes: “One thing that I like to point out in conversation about MO is that putting a question or answer out there without posing it towards some specific person often leads to meaningful interactions with awesome people. Some people start collaborations based on MO questions, but even if you don’t, you get to know a lot of people pretty well, which feels great. Also, there is something about interacting with famous people on MO that humanizes my internal representation of them.”

– Anton Geraschenko