Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,353 answers , 22,789 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Bumping posts

+ 2 like - 0 dislike
946 views

Today, polarkernel added a new random bumping feature to remind readers of potentially interesting content of PO.The current bumping rules are as follows:

* A new bump is created at random time between 6 and 18 hours since the previous bump.

* Bumped posts are older than 90 days.

* They are selected among the following groups:
 - 30% unanswered questions (invitation to write an answer).
 - 30% posts with total Q&A votes >8 (reminder of goodies we have).
 - 40% all other posts from Q&A (show representative selection).

* To give more weight to rarer topics, the relative weight w for random selection is
 - w = max(0,netvote of question)+(sum(max(0,netvote) of answers)/(frequency of the most frequent tag)
 - where the (obsolete but still existing) tag 'research-level' is excluded from this computation.

* Questions once bumped are excluded from future selection

* Do bumped questions get activity (what we all hope) they appear as normal activity in the list and a new bump will be created within maximum one hour. 
 

asked Dec 29, 2015 in Announcements by Arnold Neumaier (15,787 points) [ revision history ]
edited Dec 29, 2015 by Arnold Neumaier

This is pretty good, but I'd increase the representation of unanswered questions to 50% to improve our currently poor unanswered rates.

I also think that imported questions (questions with votes from SchrodingersCatVoter) shouldn't be displayed unless they're unanswered, as they aren't a reminder of our goodies or a representative selection of our posts.

@Dimension10

I disagree with excluding imported questions from the bumping mechanism. To me it seems not that important where the votes come from. To not exclusively represent the current PO community is a feature of the bumping mechanism not a bug, as it should also help enlarge the community.

At present, I would not increase the weight of the unanswered questions either. It is still the case that most of our current (imported or native) questions appearing on the main page stay unanswered. We should only adapt the bumping mechanism to bring up more unanswered questions when the answering capability of our community has significantly improved ...

@Dimension10: To improve our currently poor unanswered rates needs more committed users, not more displays. I think the likelihood that some new competent people will answer some questions is higher if they see more of the stuff that is here rather than if they see even more unanswered questions.

Most of the imported questions are from the now defunct SE-TheoreticalPhysics of which we are the continuation; so these are ''our'' posts. And for the more recent ones, if they are unanswered we need answers, and if they are answered, an answer is often form PO rather than from SE 

Your answer

Please use answers only to (at least partly) answer questions. To comment, discuss, or ask for clarification, leave a comment instead.
To mask links under text, please type your text, highlight it, and click the "link" button. You can then enter your link URL.
Please consult the FAQ for as to how to format your post.
This is the answer box; if you want to write a comment instead, please use the 'add comment' button.
Live preview (may slow down editor)   Preview
Your name to display (optional):
Privacy: Your email address will only be used for sending these notifications.
Anti-spam verification:
If you are a human please identify the position of the character covered by the symbol $\varnothing$ in the following word:
p$\hbar$y$\varnothing$icsOverflow
Then drag the red bullet below over the corresponding character of our banner. When you drop it there, the bullet changes to green (on slow internet connections after a few seconds).
Please complete the anti-spam verification




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...