Dear all, I’m writing in my capacity as an elected moderator on MathOverflow (MO), with the knowledge of my fellow mods, and with the permission of the mailing list moderator, with a public service announcement. This is not to start a discussion, but to respond to a recent email calling for people to upvote specific posts on MO. MathOverflow is a community of users with, by now, more than 15 years of accumulated culture. It has an organic fabric and interactions with it will enrich and grow it like a delicate forest. It is a valuable resource that is maintained through a system of collegial trust as well as metrics (mostly invisible) that allow trusted community members to help with the somewhat voluminous quality control process, such as flagging inappropriate posts (outright spam, AI-generated nonsense answers or questions, undergraduate exercises and so on). Part of this ecosystem is the voting process. The community at large will vote as it seems fit. Some users will be present more often and vote more regularly, others might visit only on occasion and rarely cast any votes. Users gain "reputation" points (or as I like to call them “imaginary internet points”) that helps them accumulate trust in the eyes of the software, but these are hidden by default to avoid unwanted secondary effects of gamifying “reputation” as the software-centric designers of the platform have done. However, individual posts (questions and answers) have their net voting score visible, as **a** signal for the quality of the post itself (and not the person). Think of this as analogous to an article-level metric, rather than a journal- or person-level metric. We all want our research to be judged on its own merits, not the container it’s published in, and certainly not for who we personally are. One thing such voting scores reflect is the extent to which a question or answer is working ‘within the rules’ of the site. Since MO is a question-and-answer site, intended to replicate discussion at morning tea, or a colleague down the hall, or a break at a conference, the established norms of the site preclude merely asking a Dorothy Dixer question with the intent to advertise one’s own work. Answering *someone else’s* question with a pointer to one’s own work is of course ok, and useful, and welcome! Similarly, MO is not a blogging service, nor a personal website to track one’s own developing work purely for self-promotion. Edits to posts should be done only as necessary and not too frequently (the software automatically flags what it deems ‘excessive editing’ for mods to respond to). In this context, callings users to go and vote on one's behalf, in any capacity, is a type of voting fraud. It breaks this complex mix of organic structure and (out of expediency) software-driven machine of MO and sows disharmony. Doing this in response to accumulated downvotes on posts that are misaligned with social norms on MO is unhelpful to say the least—regardless of the merits of the mathematical content. I have seen great mathematics on MO that interests and, dare I say it, excites me, but if it is clearly not working within how MO is designed to operate, then I would agree with community downvotes that are attempting to signal this is a misuse of the site. In response to perceived patterns of voting—both *up* and down, though few complain about the former—that are driven by *who the person is*, rather than the mathematical content and the appropriate use of the site, the best course of action is to raise a flag or send the moderators an email so that we can investigate further and, if need be, have the votes reversed and the relevant users warned or suspended. We do this as moderators because this is exactly the type of behavior that is damaging to the organic fabric of the site. An upvoting spree on every post by one’s friend is just as system-straining as a downvoting spree on an adversary, or someone with a (real or perceived) infraction of site norms in a single case. It behoves us as category theorists to raise the profile of our field by sharing our knowledge in a collegial way, by providing a chance for our more junior members to make a reputation for themselves outside the community. MathOverflow is an excellent opportunity to do this. We welcome questions and if people know their tentative steps onto that big scary platform will be answered appropriately (and yes, the site can always improve, but it is a very large and slow ship - the board that oversees MO really does care about this issue), then it will lift CT and spread appreciation in a number of small ways. Your humble servant, David Michael Roberts You're receiving this message because you're a member of the Categories mailing list group from Macquarie University. 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