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In late 2015 and 2016 a new set of features was added to the admin interfaces that allow the admins to work with category proposals on submissions. The goal of this was to explicitly codify decisions about categories as data and to use it to efficiently deal with redundant category proposals or crosses.
These features were originally rolled out to admins only so feedback and refinements could be made before rolling it out to moderators. The functionality was made available to the moderators in late August 2016.
Update, reorganize and better document the TeX system - TeX is currently a central component of our article processing, approximately 85% of submissions are TeX or PDFTeX source. We need to update our TeX installation, improving our packaging so that it can more easily be deployed and updated, better documenting our installation, and increasing experience within the current development team. We need to update the TeX binaries to the current version of TeX Live (currently TeX Live 2011, should use 2014), update our set of style files (last update was 2011), and also update our ghostscript installation.
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HTTPS was enabled site-wide in March 2016. What remains is altering the configuration to redirect all requests to HTTPS.
- ARXIVDEV-3133
- status: in progress (partially complete)
Refine process for addition of overlap notices - Following the September 2015 recommendation of the Scientific Advisory Board, we will implement a process to put submissions on hold when overlap with other articles is detected by Paul Ginsparg's system. This will provide authors an opportunity to respond to warnings before overlap notices are added.
In recent meeting between Paul Ginsparg, Jim Entwood and Martin Lessmeister, agreement was reached that an acceptable interim solution would be for Paul Ginsparg to directly put submissions on hold with desired overlap notices which would be subject to review by the mod-admins
Consolidate web presence at the main site - The arXiv mirror network was very useful in the early days of arXiv and web. However, geographic locality of servers is much less useful now than it was when the mirror network was established, the mirrors are little used, and maintaining support for mirrors impedes development of new features on arXiv. We will discontinue the remaining six arXiv mirrors and improve capacity of the main site network. A presence at Los Alamos National Laboratory will be retained to support http://xxx.lanl.gov/ URLs and we will investigate support for TeX processing for A4 paper.
The French mirror was decommissioned earlier this year. The following mirrors (excluding LANL) remain: CN, DE, IN, ES.
- ARXIVDEV-1066
- status: in progress
Subject category aliasing for cs/math/stat - There are three subject category merges (aliases) requested in order to better represent subject areas that span major discipline boundaries. Some of these require extra work because there are pre-0704 (old identifiers, see http://arxiv.org/help/arxiv_identifier) submissions where the primary category is becoming an alias and thus the historical primary archive to identifier prefix correspondence will be broken. In the past aliases have been made on an ad-hoc basis and without the need to change existing primary archive designations. We should instead work out and document procedures for such changes. Includes work to create tools for the bulk re-categorization of submissions affected by this and later merges.
- ARXIVDEV-1179
- status: incomplete
Streamline moderator and admin interactions - Work with arXiv moderators to streamline their interactions with the system and with arXiv administrators. Will include better handling of warnings from classification and overlap detection systems, better presentation of discussions of issues and more facilities directly in the moderator web interface.
This has been partially achieved by ARXIVDEV-2503 but more work is needed, especially in the area of adding more facilities directly in the moderator web interface. It has been difficult to prioritize these features given the diverse set of moderator needs and preferences. With the addition of the UI/UX developer to our team (Manolo Bevia; .5 FTE), we hope to leverage his expertise to take some of the guesswork out of prioritization.
Tidy arXiv code and version control systems, improve test coverage, remove unused code - arXiv's codebase has evolved over more than 20 years and while there have been a number of reorganizations over this time, and work to add tests, focused work on improving structure and test coverage will improve maintainability and development productivity. We also need to remove unused code and re-evaluate legacy bug reports.
Work supporting the consolidation of arXiv's many git repositories is complete, but will require further testing before deployment on production machines.
- ARXIVDEV-2752
- status: in progress
User Support and Moderation
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