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As pointed in the comment below there are two =) I wish for Knuth to pop in here one day ;-)

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  • Quality is attractive, make it public visible. If have a blog, write about excellent questions and answers on the site, quality is attractive. You could even post a story on hacker news, reddit, or stumbleupon. Share links to great questions.

  • Seeing an own difficult question answered here, is attractive. If you notice that a TeX hacker raises a question via twitter, facebook, mailing list, Usenet, or web forum and you see there's no good answer yet, post the question here. Help her or him to get the answer. Of course include a link to the source.

  • Make package authors interested by questions and answers which can improve the package or the class.

  • Directly invite TeX experts, for example as interviewee or guest author in our upcoming TeX.SX blog.

  • Go where the TeX experts are, show up at TeX conferences and local user group meetings, talk about TeX.SX.

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  • Nice. Any chance getting e.g. Heiko Oberdiek onto this site? Herbert and Ulrike are already here as well ...
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Jul 6, 2011 at 17:23
  • @Martin: I also had that idea and mentioned him in the inviting authors for blog posts proposal - perhaps he would like to talk about his big bundle project.
    – Stefan Kottwitz Mod
    Commented Jul 6, 2011 at 17:33
  • Is the bundle not just for easier upload to / maintainability on CTAN? (I started to think to bundle my smaller packages as well for just this reason, but didn't dared to ask for a place on CTAN.) Some packages are very related and depend on them as well, so it makes sense to only release combined updates.
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Jul 6, 2011 at 17:40
  • @Martin: I guess so. However, I noticed several times that a user wasn't able to install a package (for instance with MiKTeX) just because he did not find it in the package manager, as it was part of a bigger bundle.
    – Stefan Kottwitz Mod
    Commented Jul 6, 2011 at 20:26
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    Re @MartinScharrer's first comment: status-completed.
    – Andrew Stacey
    Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 8:43
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I think building up the reputation of this site as a - nay, the - place to get high-quality answers to *TeX questions will be a major factor. Any experts who are interested in answering questions at all will probably want to be associated with the best site out there. And any experts who aren't interested in answering questions, well, we weren't going to get them anyway. Obviously, we're not going to spring out of private (or even public) beta with that reputation already built, but what we need to do now is make the decisions that will guide the development of the site in such a way that we're setting it up to be the best resource on its topic.

Besides that, it's probably mostly a matter of using our connections. As mentioned, there are a couple of real live LaTeX hackers registered and perhaps they know other people who would be interested in a site like this. Many of the rest of use are probably in academic environments, which means we're likely to have a lot of contact with other people who use *TeX and perhaps even have written packages for it. They'd be valuable resources for the site, if they're interested.

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Improve the interface. I want to see a threaded interface in date order (latest last), with topics I have read or skipped greyed out. It needs to show only the OP of each thread by default, with the conventional [+] to expand and [-] to contract. In fact, I'd like to read the site like a Usenet newsgroup :-) but keep the vote-based ranking.

P

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    Ain't gonna happen. And it's really not intended to be like a Usenet group, so this is a case where I think you need to adapt to the interface, not the other way around. It's different, not worse, IMO, and once you get used to it, it works quite well. In particular, it's designed to be much more archival than a Usenet group, and this is one of its strengths. But that very property doesn't fit so well with more dynamic way that a Usenet group works.
    – Alan Munn
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 18:59
  • We don't have any influence on the actual interface. The site is provided to us by the stackexchange.com people and identical for the dozens of their sites. Adjustments are limited to the styles (colors, background images, default syntax highlighting, etc.)
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 20:32
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On the other hand, Knuth has a mathoverflow t-shirt!

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    If this site ever makes t-shirts, we should give him one!
    – PersonX
    Commented Jul 27, 2010 at 18:20
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    Now that photograph would make good copy!
    – Andrew Stacey
    Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 8:16
  • Now that there are TeX.SE shirts meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1837/… it would be great to send him one.
    – Psirus
    Commented Jan 11, 2012 at 8:55

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