Physics Overflow is almost ready for public beta!

Question

Looking at the road map it seems that most of the things and tasks listed there are either [DONE] or deferred to [LATER] by now. So to me it seems it is time to consider starting the Public Beta of PhysicsOverflow now :-).

The things we still need to finish should be doable within a few days and I try to summarize them here (help, additions, and corrections are welcome):

From the Road Map:

• Disallow robots to search post revisions
• Let search engines in 
• Finish and update the FAQ (thank for the good work to Dimension10). From a short look it seems the following sections should still be expanded a bit
  - What is PhysicsOverflow (1)
  - How do I edit a post
  - The Navigation bar (14)
  - The Moderation Queues (15), if this does not have the same purpose as the description closing etc
  - Glossary of PhysicsOverflow (19). I am not quite sure about what kind of things should be listed there ?
• Set the landing page to main (Q&A)
• Set the permissions to the public beta values
• Correct users with too long user names

Reconsider site representation issues
if needed, such as

• the custom texts on the ask form, answer form, comment form
• custom messages for new users
• the standard mail sent to newly registered users
• Prepare and plan the promotion of PhysicsOverflow as discussed for example here.

So, after communicating with Polarkernel, it seems feasible to start the Public Beta of PhysicsOverflow next week at Midnight 0000 hours 4 April 2014 (Fri) [CEST]. Is this okay with everybody? 

Comments

I think the logo could do with having a "beta" attached to it, something similar to chemistry.se

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BTW we should not forget announcing PhysicsOverflow on the meta of MathOverflow ;-)

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@physicsnewbie That's a great idea, but it may give the impression to ex-TP users that the site will, like TP.SE, go down if it doesn't attract too much of an audience. This is obviously not true. 

It could be a good idea, to instead of just writing "beta", we could give it something like 

\(\mathsf{beta} =\pm \iint\ldots\int\beta\mbox{ }\delta\psi \mbox{d}x\mbox{ } \delta\psi \mbox{d}x\ldots\delta\psi \mbox{d}x \)

(beta functions) 

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Nope, I tried it, but it isn't possible. 

I think that, this is because the logo is actually rendered as a raster image once the site loads, and each time the zoom setting is changed. So the href feature in vector images cannot be used, unfortunately : (

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@physicsnewbie No, the public beta is called so because 

• We still don't know how fast users are going to gain reputation, so the reputation values aren't confirmed till the end of the public beta. 
• The reviews section isn't done yet. Speaking of which I have an idea for local contribution hosting, I will post about it later. 
• Not all questions have been imported yet.   

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Actually, now that I think about it, it might be possible to bring some of the NavBar Options to the logo. Wait, I'll try to do this later today... 

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@dimension10 Maybe that's the problem: we're trying to copy the format of the development of TP.SE, without asking if we have to. Physics overflow is now public, and that's all there is to it, isn't it? No need to give it a "public beta" status.

Answer 1

I think that the TP.SE question Public beta: Attracting users? is also relevant to us. 

In my opinion, there are some plug-ins (a job for polarkernel) remaining to be installed as soon as possible, such as 

• [NO] SEO Links (discussion)  
• [DONE] Q2A Webmasters  
• [DONE] Warn On Leave   
• [DONE] Comment2Answer  
• [DONE] Q2A Embed Media
• [DONE] Q2A Featured Questions  
• [LATER] Image Manager  

These plug-ins are good to have, and the first one is almost a necessity. I wonder why Q2A does not incorporate it in it's core. 

The second one gives admins some great tools to see how well the site is faring at a glance. It could even be made public I hope.  

Additionally, we also may want to decide on solutions for having a chat room. That somehow reminds me; we may also consider retaining the tpproposal blog as a (hopefully $\infty$) life-long blog for Physics Overflow. The chat room; I'm not sure if we should wait for the public beta to start or not, but I just thought of reminding everyone about it.   

From the things you have listed the following need to be done by 0000 hours, [CEST]      

• Sunday:
  • [DONE] Edit the site description. (discussion)

• Tuesday:
  • We should invite everyone listed in the blog post.   
• Wednesday: 
  • [DONE] I (and anyone else who is interested) need to finish [DONE] 14 and [DONE] 15 of the FAQ. 
  • [DONE] The long users need to be corrected (I will do this). 
  • [DONE] The main page needs to be set to Q&A. (a job for polarkernel)  
• Thursday:  
  • [DONE] Change permissions 
  • [DONE] Edit robots.txt; allowing / but disallowing /revisions and /revisions/ (a job for polarkernel and dimension10)
  • [DONE] Changing all admin-added links (in the sidebar, navbar, etc.)  
  • [DONE] Post a welcome to public beta
  • [DONE] Post a post on an intro to the reviewing section 
  • [DONE; to be expanded] Post a "Help Promote Physics Overflow" post. 
  • [TO BE DONE ASAP] Set your alarm clocks right for 2300 GMT/UCT(Wed), 0000 CEST, 0430 IST, 0700 ECST, 1900 (Wed) EAST, or 1600 (Wed) WAST. 
  • (additions by <polarkernel>)
  • [DONE] Shut the site down for proper movement
  • [DONE] Move the site to the root http://www.physicsoverflow.org/
  • [DONE] Restart the site, accessible only for super-administrators.
  • [DONE] Open the new site and going online.
  • [DONE] Open the champagne and propose a toast to this great team!
  • (additions by </polarkernel>)
• Saturday 
  • [DONE] Announce on the TRF thread
  • Dilaton will write a guest post on TRF 
  • [DONE] Announce on the blog
  • [DONE] Post on Quora.  
  • [DONE] Post on  meta.MO. 
  • On the blog, user10001 (dushya) had the idea of promoting the site to various physicists in the world.       

Comments

Great!! Thank you for your migration plan. I will test these plugins on my local server and then install all of them today. I hope, all this beta-code will run without interferences after such a short testing time. Please add the following items at the end of your list on Thursday (all done by me):

• Edit and install HTTP 301 redirect on old URL (just to be sure)
• Shut the site down for proper movement
• Move the site to the root http://www.physicsoverflow.org/
• Restart the site, accessible only for super-administrators.
• Open the new site and going online.
• Open the champagne and propose a toast to this great team!

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I don't think Dilaton should be making a guest post on TRF, or using up publicity quotas elsewhere to publicise a site that's still in development. He can do this when it comes out of beta. But publicizing it via ordinary channels available to everyone else is fine, such as on the TRF thread, sending emails to other users, word of mouth in chat rooms. We need to find out early on if at least some people are joining, contributing etc, and if not, what can be done about it.

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@polarkernel Done. 

I too thought of having some way to redirect from /trollsouthere14/ to / which could also solve any absolute trollsouthere14 URLs.  

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Hm, the Q&A part will be fully working though. It is in particular the Reviews section that will need further development ...

Maybe one could even write two times on TRF (if Lumo allows it):
- a first Guest Post to introduce PhysicsOverflow and focus on the Q2A part
- a second Guest Post in August introducing the Reviews section in some more detail, mayb best done by @RonMaimon ...

And I think for such a highly interactive website it is normal to get improved in the course of its live by new and better features etc, even graduated Sites on SE for example keep continuously evolving.

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@dimension10 you may downvote my comment, but my concerns still count. It's going to be very embarassing if after publicising the site, less than 5 users joined and regularly participated because the public was concerned about the fairness of the moderators here, for example.

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@physicsnewbie One would need to be quite cynical to doubt moderator fairness before joining the site.  

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I am not quite sure about how inviting/alerting people listed in this blog post is best done in practice. Some of them may have an email, and many of them can be pinged.

But mass pinging on wikipedia is a bit dangerous, it should be done very carefully by:

- Pinging people on old inactive (at best meta) posts
- deleting the comment as soon as we have evidence that the person has seen it

There are many scalawags on that site who have nothing better to do than bringing other people into trouble and enjoy the stirring, as soon as they see an opportinity (for example our pinging comments) to do so ...

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The only people listed in the moderator nominee thread people have issued some concerns about are Lumo (he has not time to be a mod) and Ben Crowell (he is not yet invited to the site).

If their are other concerns pertaining to other people, maybe they should be mentioned in that thread too?
 

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@Dilaton While people can have concerns about moderators, it is impossible to restrict those who join the site. If those whom we invite turn out to be bad people, just ban them. 

By the way, I am conducting the TOP SECRET : ) activity now, it isn't censorship, but it keeps Physics Overflow safe from external forces.   

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- SEO Links creates a bunch of error messages, therefore not installed.
- Q2A Webmasters: installed, see admins nav-bar

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- "Warn on Leave" installed and running.

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... to add to the topic of error messages: when clicking the yellow dot from the message box, I get "Fehler: Verbindung fehlgeschlagen" as if I had no internet connection, but my internet connection works ... Could this be some negative interference between the message box and a new plug in?

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When I click on Webmaster on the top navigation bar, the site with the statistics appears, but at the top of it (top of the page) I also get this line:

Warning: set_time_limit(): Cannot set time limit due to system policy in /customers/b/e/4/physicsoverflow.org/httpd.www/trollsouthere14/qa-include/qa-base.php(510) : eval()'d code on line 255

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- Comment2Answer is installed and running. You may try, but on my local server, it did not work.

The Webmaster warning message will disappear, because I have switched off php-warnings now for security reasons. Our PHP-server does not allow to set time-limits.

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- Q2A Embed Media is installed. You may configure it to your needs under Admin->Plugins.
- Q2A Featured Questions is installed. The ID of featured questions can be inserted using the options of the plugin at Admin->Plugins.
- Installing the Image Manager makes no sense. It searches for images stored in the database as blobs. As long as we do not yet have an upload facility, we have no blobs in the database.

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@polarkernel Thanks for installing the plugins! I thought we could install the image manager because one is still allowed to upload profile images, but it isn't that important, anyway. 

However, a small bug report, when I click on the yellow dot on the top bar, instead of sending me to physicsoverflow.org/trollsouthere14/user/dimension10?tab=history, it sends me to localhost/physicsoverflow/user/dimension?tab=history, which gives a "This Webpage is not available". This may be the same problem that @Dilaton had...    

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@dimension10, @Dilaton Should work now. I accidently did a change on this site instead on my local site. Sorry

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@polarkernel Yes it works now. Thanks.   

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I have now reimported all the long users who are worth correcting.

I have not corrected those who I don't think are worth correcting, simply because if I do re-import their posts, their points would simply go into deep negatives, and they wouldn't want to regain their accounts.   

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Ah yes I was right about the meta.TP.SE being useful for us. The TP.SE people too posted on meta.MO (now tea.MO, meta.MO is now different) see here: http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/1161/theoretical-physics-stack-exchange-just-went-live/#Item_0 and the nice MO mods (actually the MO founder, who is now retired if I'm not wrong) went on to even put a banner on the top of MO. 

I think that because of the beginnings of MO outside the SE network, they will probably be fine with an announcment.  

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We're somewhat behind time. We are yet to invite many users, and it's already Wednesday. But I guess it's ok. 

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I know, but it might still be ok as all of the other task due Wednesday seem to be done (?).

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The main page is set to Q&A. Can be revoked very easy if required.

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@polarkernel Thanks! But I notice that even featured meta questions (through the featured questions plugin) do not appear on the main page. Is it possible to fix this? 

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Not that easy, I would have to create a new page type. Actually, there are pages like the following, that I can make landing pages:

main                  Recent questions and answers in Q&A
qa                    Recent questions and answers
questions             Recent questions
activity              Recent activity    
activity/main         Recent activity in Q&A
activity/meta         Recent activity in Meta
questions             Recent questions
questions?sort=votes  Highest voted questions  (and similar sorts)

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@polarkernel Ok, then you can leave it as it is with /main as the main page. We could keep this for later.  

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I yesterday asked Lumo per mail if his promise to allow a guest post to announce PhysicsOverflow on TRF still holds, but he did not answer so far  ... :-/

So I am not sure if he will still allow it, maybe @Dimension10 or anybody else could ask about it too on TRF?

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@dilaton best not to pester Lubos over this, remembering he gave up space on his blog for the site, which we should all be grateful for. Let's all thank him under the thread on his site, now that the site is launched

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Yeah I'll leave it now alone ...

I can still post an announcement at other places.

It is a bit strange that Dimension10 seems to be off line now ...

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@Dilaton sorry for being offline : ( It was well past midnight for me.

I agree with physicsnewbie in this case, Lubos was very kind to give us some space for our discussion. 

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Posting a guest post on TRF seems no longer realistic...
But we have at least shortly announced it on the theoretical physics forums thread Lumo installed for us.

I have just aske quid again in a MO chat room if he personally thinks we could write a short announcement in their meta. I am working on a text now.

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Now I have announced PhysicsOverflow on the meta of MathOverflow :-)