FAQ discussion

Question

The official FAQ can be found here. This thread is preserved for discussion about specific FAQ's. To propose a new FAQ, please create a new meta post, and tag it with the-faq

Note: This thread is not actively maintained; please refer to the official FAQ.  

This question will serve as the FAQ for PhysicsOverflow (found in the answers). Note that it is not finalised yet, and you should feel free to contribute to it, and share your views on it.     

It includes policies, rules, and FAQs in general.      

Answer 1

(18) How do I regain my SE account? 

If you participated on the Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or the Physics Stack Exchange, then your posts may already have been imported, so you may already have an account on Physics Overflow.  Please search for your account to check if this is the case.

Enter your username, and press "Search".

If you are lead to your profile, your account exists. Then you can regain access to your imported account. To do so, click on "Regain SE account" in the sidebar sidebox. Enter the email, username, and password that you used on TheoreticalPhysics.SE or Physics.SE.

 

Then press "Register". You will then be logged in to your account, where you are recommended to change your password. If your SE account is deleted, you can register as a new user and ask for your imported posts to be assigned to your account as described in the sidebar sidebox. If you accidentally register as a new user, even though you have posts which were imported, you can ask for your accounts to be merged as described in the sidebar sidebox. If you don't remember your account particulars, you can ask an administrator to send them to you as described in the regain account page.

If you never had an SE account, or never had graduate-level posts on SE, just register as a new user.

Answer 2

(19) Import of SE questions

All the questions from Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange have been imported, as they fall into the "graduate-level" category. 

Most questions from Physics Stack Exchange in high-level tags which are not taggable as popular-science are theoretically eligible for import, and are given priority if they are endangered, very high-level, or spotted early.  

Some such questions are listed here and here in the blog. 

The final procedure in the long run is to list questions that should be imported on the Request for import votes thread, accessible from the top menu bar.

Inappropriate questions (imported or not) can be listed in the corresponding community moderation threads (they mimic the review queues of SE) accessible from the link Moderate in the top menu bar.

The copyright issues have been taken care of, since Stack Exchange is CC-by-SA content, and we have attributed them, and are not a commercial for-profit. For more information see the page Attributions.   

Answer 3

(22) How do I receive notifications?

When someone comments on your post, answers your question, pings you, votes on your post, etc. you will see a small number (in a yellow background) beside your username in the top-bar.  

It will lead to your history page. For example, if your username is John Doe, you will be lead to this page. The unread notifications appear highlighted. 

Note: This plugin does not work on mobile devices, as kindly pointed out by Urs Schreiber. In fact, if you visit the site on a mobile device, the unread notifications will appear as read. So if you have just accessed the site on a tablet or phone, please also check the recent read notifications on a non-mobile device.  

Answer 4

(23) How do I ping a user?  

To alert a user, please use the "@" command and remove spaces from the username, example, the user "John Doe" should be pinged as "@JohnDoe", while the user "Johndoe" should be pinged as "@JohnDoe". The post author is always automatically pinged (unless you are the post author).

Answer 5

(21) How do I search PhysicsOverflow?  

You may search PhysicsOverflow from the top-right search bar.  

Alternatively, you my use PhysicsOverfind, a Google Custom Search.   

Answer 6

(24) How do I typeset in LaTeX on PhysicsOverflow?  

PhysicsOverflow supports MathJax for \(\LaTeX\) support.  

You may click the "\(\TeX\)" button in the editor to enter LaTeX as described here. However, you may also type equations between dollar signs for inline mathematics and double-dollar signs for block equations.  

For a more detailed tutorial on MathJax, please see this post.