What can you do to help?

Question

You like the Cryptography site, and you would like to help us along our quest for knowledge. You might be asking yourself the question what can be done to enhance the site and site experience. Quite often these are simple things, but such things can make a big impact. What can you do?

Answer 1

Here is a non-extensive list of things you can do:

1. Help newcomers. You can provide positive criticism without getting mean or voting somebody into oblivion. Provide links to the help pages or Meta subjects. Welcome new users even if they do not directly play by the rules. We're always needing fresh users, or the site will go stale. Don't forget to upvote whenever the question / answer has sufficient quality, they might well return the favor later on.
2. Up/Down Vote! Whenever you vote you help the site gain quality. For questions, you can upvote even if the question sounds great to you. Make sure that you only downvote when you are certain. For answers it's the other way around; if you are reasonably sure that the answer is correct, vote up. Vote down if you think the answer is probably not correct or well explained. When downvoting, please leave a comment or upvote a previous comment explaining what you think is wrong.
3. Enhance the question title and tags. Often overlooked, the title and tags are really important for finding the question and subsequently, the answers. Making the title as specific and concise possible and include keywords for easy searching. Conversely, do not make minor enhancements to the grammar or spelling of posts if all your edits are placed in the review queue please.
4. Edit posts to use MathJax / $\TeX$. You can use this helpful guide to find Cryptography / MathJax specific notation.
5. Edit Tag Wiki's when you've got the time. There is a lot of empty tag Wiki's that can be easily filled. If you have more time to spare then you can also try and remove unhelpful tags after discussing this in Meta. But do prepare yourself for this and ask for help in the side channel chat if you think you need it.
6. Search for question duplicates. There are plenty of questions on the site and even the experienced users won't be able to remember even a large percentage of them. So if you think you see a rather generic question, or if you see one that rings a bell, then feel free to do a bit of dupe-hunting. Dupe hunters are regarded very well in the Cryptography community, but do please flag for a moderator or discuss in chat or meta if you are not sure.
7. Perform review tasks. Here at Cryptography, we're generally fortunate to have a rather shallow, well-maintained review queue. We could, however, do with some diversity of users that perform the tasks, so feel free to join the regulars there. Having more than one viewpoint improves quality and allows for faster responses from the review queue.
8. Flag comments that are not required anymore. Having large conversations below questions and answers distracts from the answer, and once the comments have been processed they are usually not needed anymore. Please flag those comments so the mods can take care of them.

Advocate for the site. Point to questions and answers from blogs etc. Links to the site will allow it to score much higher in the results of the various search engines. Point out the site to colleagues, and encourage them to ask questions

• preferably after asking them to search for dupes and read the tutorials.

And if you simply want to burn some spare time, please visit the chat for having interesting conversations about anything cryptography related. Implementing cryptography, requests to cryptographers, and kittens walking over your keyboard are all considered on topic.