The main feature of the site is the question and answer forum. After registering as a user of the site, you may pose questions which will be "answered" by a panel of mentors.

What kind of questions? A typical question would ask whether a statement is known to be true. Our mentors may very well say that they don't know. Do not expect our mentors to do your work for you. Our goal is to help you in those situation when you face a question that 'ought to have been studied by someone already' but you don't know where to look for an answer for it. A question that is likely to have been considered by others, but which is too "simple" to expect as the main result of an article, and hence very hard to determine whether it is settled in the literature or not. For more on this please read our page describing mentors. That's the best way to see what kind of questions you may expect to be answered.

What kind of answers? Our mentors will reply to your question with some references for you to read to learn more about your question. They will not give complete solutions to problems in algebraic geometry. They may not even give a complete reference. They may even say they don't know.

After you have received your "answer", your work is not done. For the benefit of other readers, you are asked to write a short summary of what you learned from following up on the mentor's reply. This summary will be added to our archive. You are strongly encouraged to consult the archive before submitting questions. Maybe your question has already been answered!

To prevent abuse of mentor's resources, you are allowed a maximum of five open questions at a time. This means that before you can ask a sixth question, you must post a follow-up to one of the questions you have already asked.

If you are an expert in a particular area of algebraic geometry, we ask you to become a mentor. For more details, see the section describing mentors.