We Have Liftoff!

Liftoff

PhysicsOverflow public beta is online now since 17 days. After a turbulent start with some database issues on our host and spam attacks, now the site is stable and working fine. After an ongoing and continuous improvement of details, the section with Q&A on physics takes now the main part of activity on the site. Since we have gone online at 4th April, more than 150 new users have registered on the site and many of them are already quite active. The number of visits per day exceeded the number of visits on Theoretic Physics on SE since the first day, as can be seen in the following graphics:

This is great, since we aren’t even part of a huge network! Our questions per day is about 5.6 (excluding imported posts), which is a lot more than TP.SEs. However, as already stated, the site does not depend on these figures, there is no deadline, as it was on TP. Also the term beta does not mean that the site will go away, it means only that we have still much more ideas to obtain the full-fledged version of PhysicsOverflow.

Please Contribute

Now is the time where the site gets shaped. If you participate now with your votes, ideas, opinions, questions and answers, you contribute to build a site with contours as you like them. Don’t stay outside, have a look at PhysicsOverflow, register there if you like it, or contribute here on this blog.

Review Section

We are still a small team. However, we are working with full power to be able to leave the beta state and to complete the site, as intended. The main part for this will be the Review Section, as already announced in this blog. This is not only a reconfiguration of the site, it requires a considerable part of new development, because such a feature is not foreseen in the Question2Answer framework. In detail, the following main functionalities have to be developed:

• Integration of new pages, called Submission and Review.
• Two voting criterias, one for originality and one for accuracy.
• New page design, enabling display of a score value from the votings.
• Add feature to add multiple authors.
• Redesign of voting mechanism, distributing votes to multiple authors.
• Integration in the rep update and recount system.
• Adding and managing the required database tables.
• Increasing the category depth to realize hierarchical tagging system.
• Integration of score as new sorting criterion.
• Software for mass import from ArXiV.
• Software for daily import from ArXiV.

We are on the way with all that and look forward to realize these steps within a reasonable time. Stay tuned!