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The news that MathJax CDN shutting down on April 30, 2017 was recently brought to my attention. I have updated ChatJax to use the alternate server given in the MathJax post. It seems to work well, but if StackExchange is going to host a local copy to use with the sites that support MathJax, I will update ChatJax to use that server instead.

I posted this on Math meta and was asked to post here. Also, I was told that the MathJax team has already contacted the SE devs about this. So my question becomes: what are the SE plans for continued support of MathJax?

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    We don't know yet. We are going to talk it over in our next team meeting. This is not super urgent, in that there's still to the end of the month to deal with it. Don't worry - we will make sure MathJax is still supported on the sites it is enabled on.
    – Oded
    Apr 1, 2017 at 18:23
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    I am not giving an answer yet since... we don't have one.
    – Oded
    Apr 1, 2017 at 18:23
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    The title is a bit misleading. The MathJax "site" is not going offline, only the CDN service at cdn.mathjax.org is being retired. For those stumbling upon this post and using cdn.mathjax.org themselves, other free CDNs like cdnjs.com provide equivalent service.
    – Peter Krautzberger
    Apr 1, 2017 at 19:34
  • I have updated the title of the math meta post as well. Thanks.
    – robjohn
    Apr 1, 2017 at 20:15
  • @Oded but isn't MathJax just a bunch of JS files that can simply be hosted on your own servers?
    – Shadow Wizard Is Sad And Angry
    Apr 1, 2017 at 20:31
  • @ShadowWizard - that's one of the things we need to discuss. I believe we will be talking to MathJax people as well. Like I said - I don't know what the plan is right now, as there is no plan. It may very well end up like that.
    – Oded
    Apr 1, 2017 at 23:35
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    Lemme get this right - MathJax chose to make a major announcement about a service shutdown on March 31, exactly one day before Don't Trust The Internet Day 2017?
    – E.P.
    Apr 4, 2017 at 17:02
  • @E.P. most likely wasn't on purpose, since CF contract probably ends on April.
    – Braiam
    Apr 13, 2017 at 3:24

2 Answers 2

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We have updated all sites in our network to use the CloudFlare CDN for MathJax at: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.0/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full

If you are using any type of blockers, you will need to whitelist this domain / URL in order to have MathJax support.

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  • Thanks for the info! ChatJax is already using that CDN, so we are all using the same version.
    – robjohn
    Apr 13, 2017 at 16:28
  • I've updated the domain list post, I think I got it right, but somebody should confirm (rev 27).
    – Jason C
    May 20, 2017 at 12:59
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Thanks for the heads-up, robjohn! I've just updated ChatJax++ to also use the new CDN.

In fact, ChatJax++ now automatically loads the MathJax URL and settings from the SE site that the chat room belongs to, so if SE ever decides to switch to a new CDN again, or even to self-host MathJax, the script should automatically follow their example. The data is cached for a while (currently one hour, but I'll probably increase that in later versions) to avoid needlessly wasting bandwidth and SE server resources. As a convenient side effect, I no longer need to manually update the script to keep it synced with the list of SE sites that use MathJax, or with the specific MathJax config tweaks used on each site.

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