Is it time for us to disallow challenge-only questions?

Question

While it is somewhat out of form to edit a question with these kinds of notes, this is designed to clear up potential confusion.

status-declined's tag wiki reads:

Indicates that a request (usually a feature request) has been considered, but will not be implemented. Generally speaking... / ...the community will come to consensus that the request is unnecessary.

This is what has happened here.

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There have been countless questions recently that don't live up to Stack Exchange's quality standards. We have a responsibility as members of the Stack Exchange network site to live up to the quality standards SE expects. We need to do something to fix our question quality. This is that something.

What is Stack Exchange for, and why are we here?

Stack Exchange is a site for "Expert Answers to Expert Questions." It is a resource people go to in order to find answers to real questions that they face. Our primary purpose for being here is not to have fun playing games and solving puzzles with each other; it is to create an expert knowledge-base about puzzles and puzzle-related questions. We are here to expand the ability of the internet to address questions related to puzzles and the art of problem solving. Whatever our site policies are, they need to help facilitate this ultimate purpose. If you disagree with this, then Stack Exchange is not for you. These are not our philosophies, they are our content host's philosophies. We abide by them. All SE network sites must fulfill this purpose, otherwise the site will cease to be.

What does PPCG mean for Puzzling.SE? The answer to this question is pretty simple: absolutely nothing. We cannot and should not model ourselves after PPCG. PPCG is a massive exception to the Stack Exchange philosophy, and becoming a copy of PPCG for puzzles simply isn't an option. Structuring arguments around "that's what PPCG does" is fruitless, because we cannot and will not be them.

In one of the blog posts of yore, there were listed three rough criteria for question quality:

1. Works with the Stack Exchange philosophy
2. Is accepted by the community
3. Teaches you something that makes you better at puzzling

Questions should aim to fulfill all three of these criteria. Questions that don't are problems.

Oh, and a small foreword: the Area 51 stats are not that important in determining the overall health of a site. Let's stop using them as a justification for saying everything is alright and we don't need to change. It's not going to get us anywhere besides closure.

Questions that are simply challenges have a LOT of issues

We will list the major ones briefly here. These are broad, general categories which do not necessarily apply to each challenge question, but are all grossly prevalent.

Stack Exchange is intended to make the internet a better place, by acting as a repository of useful and relevant information, and by being a resource for those who wish to learn. This is not something challenge questions accomplish. Puzzles-as-challenges don't accomplish or in any way assist the ultimate goal of creating good, lasting, searchable information. We want people to come to this site for information, and we want to help understand concepts and ideas in puzzling.

These questions don't assist this goal. Even new users who read a challenge question aren't really helped by it if they can't solve it themselves.

Challenge questions invite lateral thinking answers. Contrary to what some might say, this is a problem. These answers are fun, but provide no lasting value and are designed solely to work around the question at hand. The community seems to support them, but that doesn't make them good. They're just silly for poking holes in a question where clearly holes were not intended to be poked.

Challenge questions result in many subjectively-correct answers. Okay, sometimes they don't, but almost always they do. Answers that are subjectively-correct aren't helpful, because the OP has to come back to the question and say "this is the answer I was thinking of." Ultimately, nobody has learned anything, and we haven't gained useful answers - only things the OP didn't happen to think of.

Even if the answers are right, they're all still just guesses. They can rarely, if ever, be more than just guesses.

Challenge questions are either unsearchable, or rehash the internet. If a challenge question is original, it is unsearchable. Nobody will ever find it; it has no lasting value, and it is highly likely that because the OP already knew the answer, nothing was learned. If a challenge question isn't original, it's already out there on the internet, and there's no point in rehashing it here.

Challenge questions consistently have terrible, terrible titles. Titles are used everywhere on the Stack Exchange network to determine what the content of a question is. Search engine optimization is performed on question titles. It's come up before that questions that are puzzles can't have descriptive titles, and this is a serious issue. Our titles must be descriptive of the contents of the questions. This isn't a choice we can bypass - it's a quality requirement. If we can't accomplish this goal, there is a serious problem.

Our site is supposed to be primarily about useful, secondarily about searchable information.

It's not possible to judge the quality of challenge questions without knowing their answers. We need to be able to determine if a question is of good quality or is on-topic without knowing what the answer is. We need to know whether we should downvote, vote to close, etc. without waiting for an answer to be posted, because this entirely defeats the purpose of these moderation tools.

Voting and close votes, the two primary tools, are used to serve as an indicator of whether a question is on-topic here and whether it is worth answering for other people. If a question has to be answered for us to know, it completely defeats the purpose of these tools.

What do we do about challenge questions?

Don't get me wrong, some challenge questions can be good. It's not as though every single challenge question is bad, but there are so many problems with them that keeping them around is unsustainable. They don't fit within the core purpose of Stack Exchange. They serve nothing but our own enjoyment and have no or little lasting value.

It's time for us to restrict them. We propose the following close reason:

This question appears to be off-topic because it contains nothing more than a puzzle asked as a challenge to the community. If you are confused about the solution to a puzzle, feel free to edit your question to highlight exactly what you need or where you're confused. Please see [this meta discussion](link to this post) for more details.

What this close reason is intended to keep:

• Questions asking for help designing a puzzle

  I have designed the following puzzle/riddle, and it has the following solution. How can I improve it/make it more solid and consistent?

• Questions asking about confusing steps in puzzles, or genuinely asking for help solving one.

  I have come across the following puzzle. I've made an attempt to solve it, and this is what I've done. Now, I'm stuck. I can't figure out how to solve this specific part. Where do I go from here?

• Questions about puzzle theory.

  What determines which positions are invalid on this puzzle?

What this close reason is intended to discard:

• Questions that contain nothing but a puzzle
• Questions that are posed as challenges to the community

• Questions not asking for input on the puzzle, guidance on how to continue, or some other puzzle-related topic.

  Sally has four apples. She eats three and gives away one. What is the mass of the sun?

How do we turn challenge questions into real questions?

I'll be honest, most of the time this isn't going to be possible to do. The reason is pretty simple: in order to go from a challenge question into a real question, the OP must have faced some problem or have some difficulty. Questions that are already answered will be hard to edit without deprecating existing answers, and that's a problem.

However, where possible, it's pretty easy to turn a challenge question into a good one. You can possibly edit it so it's asking for feedback on how to improve the question, or you can edit it so that it's otherwise not strictly a challenge question. Like we say, most of the time, this will be tricky. However, if you can find a good way to edit a question such that it fits the Stack Exchange format, you are absolutely encouraged to edit it.

If a question can't be edited, or you don't want to be the one to edit it, put it on hold.

But challenge questions are fun!

We're not here to have fun. We're here to learn, and develop/enhance the art of puzzling. You can still pose these questions in chat.

Lots of fun questions have been disallowed across the Stack Exchange network before. This doesn't mean these questions are always of low value, but it occurred because they typically are. For instance, Stack Overflow used to allow polling questions, along the lines of "Strangest language feature". These questions might sometimes be okay, but we're not here to have fun. We're here to make the internet - and ourselves - better.

But we'll lose much of our userbase/the site will be unsustainable without them!

Challenge questions do drive a slew of traffic - almost too much for our site to handle. Traffic isn't the goal of our site. Neither is the Area 51 scorecard.

What we're looking to build is a community of experts. We want people with the knowledge and experience to develop the art of puzzle solving, and we want people who will be willing to learn. If our traffic has to drop off before we can grow back to critical mass again, that's perfectly fine. It's much better than the alternative. It's much healthier than the alternative.

Besides, we had these questions aplenty back in the site's history. We can get there again, and we're confident it will happen.

tl;dr?

I'm sorry. Read this post. It's important. Be the informed voter you were meant to be.

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We will pre-empt the following riposte, though: "I like these questions" isn't a valid response to the arguments in here. The arguments in this question have nothing to do with whether people like these questions, and everything to do with whether they're even on-topic here in the first place.

We're looking forward to the community's feedback.

++The Moderator Team
Doorknob, Kevin, and Emrakul (in no particular order)

Answer 1

Your aspirations are commendable, but I don't think it is realistic to take ~90% of your content (and the community that created it) and simply toss it out telling everyone "you're doing it wrong." The story that we've convinced ourselves is that… "as soon as we stop everyone who’s using this site wrong, Will Shortz and Mike Shenk will show up." Unfortunately, we're finding that community-building does not work that way.

This strikes me as one of those places where we created a site decidedly not like Stack Overflow, but we're trying to run it as if it was. Looking back, if there was a strong contingent of users who gathered up the world's leading puzzle builders, you might (might) have been able to steer the community towards catering to their expertise. But coming in over 1,000 questions later, throwing away 90% of your content is just not practical… or community-friendly. A Puzzling site that doesn't allow puzzling is ostensibly shutting down this site as it exists today.

One thing is pretty clear to me — it is going to to be borderline impossible to get critical mass on a puzzling site where you can't even share individual puzzles. I think it’s going to be key for the community to learn to adapt itself to ensure that specific types of puzzles that don't "work" can be controlled.

It's encouraging that this site is doing as well as it is. Don't try and change it into something it's not. Despite us "pure Q&A" evangelists, philosophies change. As it turns out, we DO handle this content better than anyone else. If you find places where that is not the case, propose solutions. This site is going pretty much how we expected when we gave it the go-ahead. But we're not going to create a "Code Golf" counterpart to Puzzling SE.

Enjoy what you've built here. Puzzling is supposed to be fun. But keep it light… and most of all, have fun, and keep talking in threads like this.

Answer 2

No.

Firstly, I must commend our moderating team on their boldness and their dedication to the success of the stack. They knew that saying this would immediately lead to an army of puzzlers running to gnaw their heads off starting with the jugular. It's understandable. I've been sharpening my set of pearly whites too. That's balls. That's dedication.

Here's the thing though. There are obvious problems with removing challenge questions.

• No users.
• No questions.
• No activity whatsoever.

All the site will be is half a dozen people tops asking each other puzzling questions simply to keep the site open. They'll have passion for keeping the site going, but they won't really need the answers.

There are downsides to keeping the puzzles, too.

• Crappy content that needs removal.
• Needing more firm guidelines.
• Bigger strain on moderators.

But at least we'll have a community. At least we'll have a purpose. Think about this.

A user goes onto stack overflow because their Qt C++ gui app is giving them a sigsegv whenever they pass their doEverything() function an int of four. They can't figure out how to fix it.

Even a fairly good answer is only ever going to be useful to two or three people. It's tough to get specific answers that apply to everyone. Puzzle challenges on the other hand help every single user looking for a puzzle challenge. That's what SE is all about, satisfying as many users as possible. It could even be argued that this type of question accomplishes that goal more than any other in the entire stack exchange network.

On stack overflow, people simply dump hundreds of lines of code and say "fix this." I would argue that that's far worse than puzzle challenges, but it's the norm there. Other stacks like math have even tried puzzles, but it didn't make sense for them. This is the place. Not only does it help us, it helps the network overall have a place to put puzzles.

This whole idea is simple. A college kid that stops doing everything they love so that they can focus on academic success. They get a degree in something that doesn't matter to them and lead a mediocre career because they have zero passion.

Don't kill our passion. If you do, there will be nothing left but a husk of a community. Instead, use that passion to help improve Puzzling and make it both what we want it to be and what we need it to be.

Answer 3

If "no challenge questions" is the official site philosophy, I can certainly accept that. I consider it somewhat unfortunate since the only reason I come here is for the challenge questions, but I'll find a new watering hole somewhere. ;)

Generally speaking, I don't see that the SE format works at all well for the designated "primary purpose" when it comes to puzzling. Most of the best sites for puzzle solution strategies are tailored to specific puzzles or classes of puzzle. They come equipped with numerous examples, glossaries, exhaustive lists of external resources, and solvers right on the site, none of which SE's format allows. The sites aren't limited to a modular, disconnected question-based format. The content is generally organized into useful hierarchies, lists, tutorials, etc., well beyond the abilities of searching and tagging. Most importantly, the content is often replete with data tables, HTML tables, large figures, auto-generated Wikipedia-style hyperlinks to related content, and dozens of other features that SE doesn't provide.

In short, while puzzling.SE may aspire to be a loosely-knit collection of simple puzzle questions with simple answers, my strong belief is that (in its current form) it very much lacks the capacity to become "the place" where serious puzzlers would come for questions related to the site's primary purpose. With challenge questions deemed off-topic, I suspect the site would simply die. Regardless, such is not the end of the world. My understanding of the SE "beta" forums is that they're "beta" precisely because SE is trying to determine which topics their format works for and which ones it doesn't.

At any rate, I had a fun run while it lasted. I wish the SE puzzling team the best of luck with converting to the new format. It'll certainly take some doing ;)

Answer 4

I suspected this was coming, however I don't see how Puzzling.SE can actually survive in the format that you're describing.

I go to Stack Overflow for help with programming - I program all day every day, and sometimes I don't know something, which makes SO perfect for a Q&A site about solving programming questions. Lots of people do it all day, every day.

I go to Ask Different on occasion for help with something on one of my Macs, because I use them all day every day, and sometimes I don't know how to tweak something, or something unusual goes wrong. Lots of people use them all day, every day.

I go to PPCG.SE frequently because I'm interested in it. I don't golf code, and I have no reason to do so, but it's pretty cool to look through the challenges because they're interesting. Nobody does it all day, every day.

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Admittedly this is a small sample size, as I only regularly use a couple of Stacks, but I believe the trend follows on the other major stacks:

Math.SE is something a lot of people do all day every day - mathematicians, students, teachers, programmers, and the list goes on; math is commonplace.

English Language is something a lot of people do all day every day - again, students and teachers, translators, writers, etc. all use either nuanced language or language help regularly.

Server Fault is something a lot of people do all day, every day - sysadmins, nuff said.

Even Arqade.SE is something a lot of people do all day, every day - don't tell me people don't spend hours daily playing games. I certainly did as a student.

Ask Ubuntu, Game Development, Photography, Seasoned Advice and the list goes on - these are all things that lots of people do all day, every day. This is why they're great Q&A format sites, and why they're thriving sites.

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Niche sites which are not all day every day jobs for people are doomed to never be successful in the Q&A format. PPCG.SE has done extremely well for itself because it's been allowed to break the format and do something which better suits its natural audience.

Banning challenge questions from Puzzling.SE will kill the site. It'll never make it out of beta because there are simply not enough people to sustain a full Q&A stack on something which they do so infrequently.

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Personally I think a far better way to go about it would be to ban "poor questions" - it's hard to objectively define a "good challenge", but what about other methods?

What do the following questions have in common:

• You Force Heaven to be Ecstasy
• Duel between the knight and the dragon
• Variations on a Theme

Which the following questions do not:

• The Security to the Party [Part 36] - an interesting one!
• My new cipher with numbers
• Lolcat Steganography: Find the message hidden within the transport medium of humorous feline photography

I'd argue that the first 3 all clearly define a problem which has a demonstrably correct answer. The latter 3 are poorly defined. These are all pulled off the first page of P.SE right now; I could easily find more and/or better examples of both (the first President Murder is pretty well-defined) if required.

This is just another way of defining rules that can ensure quality content. Sure, you might need to be a little more aggressive with the closing for a little while to teach people that we expect a higher standard, but saying "we have some bad puzzles, therefore we should have no puzzles" is saying "we have some bad content, this Stack was a bad idea from the start".

Right now, with puzzles, challenges, riddles and whatnot, we have built a pretty active community which is creating a lot of unique content. I don't see how you could expect this site to have grown to a different point than that; you call the site Puzzling.SE, you'll get puzzles.

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As a related thought, Emrakul told me a basic math question is a puzzle yesterday - I find that quite hard to credit.

It feels like you're unsure what you're trying to create. The community seems to have a pretty good idea of where it wants to go though; maybe our voice should count for something?

Answer 5

Our primary purpose for being here is ...

If you disagree with this, then Stack Exchange is not for you.

Rather than asking us as a community what we think the purpose of the site should be and how we should achieve it, you seem to be choosing to rule by fiat; it's your way or the highway.

That's a shame. I'm very disappointed.

I thought we had a good community developing here; it's disappointing to be told that if I don't agree with mods then I'm not welcome here.

I don't see any point in giving my opinion on the rest of the post as "if you disagree with us then this site is not for you" makes it very clear that dissenting opinions will be completely ignored.

Answer 6

Let's take challenges somewhere else

Many on the site enjoy solving and posing puzzles as challenges, and for some, it's the only reason they're here. Accidentally, a puzzle-solving community has started to grow, and it would be sad to lose that. And some have bemoaned that if this isn't the place to post puzzles, then where is?

As the mods have explained, this site is not the place for challenges. The SE format is just not a good fit. We should respect the wishes of the founders in private beta, our hardworking mods, and our gracious hosts at StackExchange, and let the site be used for what it was originally intended. But, we need a venue better suited to puzzles as challenges, one that is tailored to the specific needs of a puzzle-solving community.

So, let's find one. And if it doesn't exist, let's make it. Join us in the Another Home chat room to discuss potential new venues.

Answer 7

I personally love posing and solving puzzles, and PPCG is my favorite SE, but at this point I'm ready to support the ban on questions as challenges.

I don't believe challenge questions are intrinsically bad for the site. Nor are they totally incompatible with the SE framework, as PPCG shows. But empirically, they have far lowered the site quality, and I don't see it getting any better.

Given a choice between challenges or questions about puzzles, I'd pick challenge questions (well, actually, both). Given a choice between low-quality challenges or high-quality questions about puzzles, I'd choose the questions about puzzles in a heartbeat.

I urge those who, like me, personally favor challenges to put those opinions aside in the name of quality. This SE is simply not the place for them. What we have now is just giving puzzles a bad name.

Answer 8

I'm sad to see things turn out this way, but I can understand the reasoning behind this. I'm glad to see that a consistent policy has been chosen, even if it is a seriously restrictive one. I like good challenge questions, but their relative rarity is a pretty convincing argument for why they should be generally disallowed.

This directly addresses the biggest problem here: lack of clarity about the focus of site and what exactly is on topic. It also indirectly addresses the second biggest problem: the inability of community moderation to prune bad content. And make no mistake, general inability or unwillingness to downvote, close or delete junk in a timely manner is the reason that there's been so much of it lying around. With a clear, simple position that challenges of all kinds are disallowed, it becomes much easier for the community to know when to cull a question or answer.

However, there is something in this decision that I strongly disagree with: the notion that questions asked on SE sites must necessarily be expert questions to be appropriate. This is manifestly not so. Of course, we want expert questions and lots of them, but beginner or intermediate level questions are perfectly acceptable, assuming they're well formed and on topic. Disallowing challenge questions will, as mentioned, cause a huge drop in activity. Let's not overreact and say that "non-expert" questions about making puzzles are also not appropriate; that would cost us even more users and open up a whole new is-this-on-topic-or-not problem. If it turns out that such questions are a problem, we can always disallow them in the future.

Answer 9

I have commented a lot to the other answers in this thread, but there is one thing I think needs adding. (Therefore this posting.)

Once a clear directions/goal of this site has been finalized one thing needs doing:

Delete all questions not fitting this goal.

Yes, this is harsh.

Yes, this will destroy a lot of good content. (And all of my own puzzles.)

Yes, this will bring the number of questions on this site to <100 (this is a guess not a fact)

Yes, this will piss-off a large number of (former) contributors (and most likely drive them away.)

But: It will be the only way to achieve what the then-defined goal is. And it will give a clean slate to build on.

As long as (the majority?) of postings on site are not in line with the declared goal, they will lure people with false ideas (and they spent time and then get pissed-off.), and offer plenty of endless "...but XY is the same..." arguments.

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Don't get me wrong. I like the site as it is now and it has served me well, but I can see, that it is not what this site was meant to be and should be about (as defined by the people creating the site). I will most likely not be on the new site a lot, but that doesn't change my opinion: If you want to get it right, you'll have to do it without compromise.

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Personally, I stopped contributing to puzzles (and adding puzzles) on the site now (i.e. from today onward). Not out of spite or anger, not at all. But I don't want to waste my time, nor do I want to waste the time of moderators. Once it is 100% clear what this site is meant to be, I will then reconsiders participation depending on how it fits what I want/need.

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Afterthought: If there is a reasonable way to "delete" the postings as suggested above form the "active" site (i.e. have it invisible to everybody newly arriving on the site), while keeping them for reference, that might be preferred.

Answer 10

THIS SIMPLY WON'T WORK!

Honestly, I get what you're saying, I respect that you are trying to steer this site into a stack exchange format, but this is going to kill the site.

I came here because I enjoy the site, and the puzzles on it, I enjoy asking and answering clever questions created by the community.

It already is a Q&A format as long as questions aren't too broad, instead of killing the site, causing members to ambandon it, and ruining all your hard work, a better direction is just to slowly but surely improve the quality and broadness of questions.

They way you're taking this is dooming the site for extinction.

Answer 11

Okay, this seems to be repeating word for word my recent proposal, so I find it... odd that no credit is being given anywhere in the original post. Regardless, after reading all (well, not all, there is sooo much of it :O ) the discussion that has happened here in the last 24 hours (missed out on it entirely) I have an entirely different solution/proposal:

What if we split up the site?

Personally I think a site where challenges are simply posted and solved is going to die, now I might well be wrong (!) , but at the very least it's different from the standard SE Q&A format. Additionally reputation on this sites means little due to extremely strong popularity problem and there is a lot of chaos. If instead this site would - with the blessings of SE management - be split into two sites it could actually work great:

Puzzling.SE for puzzle creationg and puzzle solving

• Popularity problem is smaller
• Moderation is easier with clear on and off topicness
• Questions as defined in the original puzzling.SE proposal would once again come front and center and find a good place

Challenges.SE for posting and solving challenges

• Another site that broadly focuses on a non Q&A format challenge solving. This would be analogous to SO and codegolf.SE (with the difference that it would be impossible to govern challenges.SE as well as codegolf, for reasons outlined in various other posts)

Challenges.SE would still refer to puzzling.SE for conceptual problems and puzzling.SE would refer to challenges.SE as the test bed somehow in a similar way codereview.SE now works for SO. It would solve the entire tension that has developed on this site and give a clear direction for both communities (with a great overlap between the two as well)

PS.

Why not tags?

In theory the same could be achieved with tags, but the problem is that spamming mass producible puzzles and their solutions is far easier than getting good questions and answers about puzzling itself. This thus means that both reputation is skewed and actual valuable content is lost in the noise of the rest of the questions.

Answer 12

@xnor what bugs me is that people had my question closed. Although it looked like a real question as pointed out by Emakrul. But real questions (creating information) should be kept. What if it really was a question? There was no evidence proving the opposite! I intended it to be a riddle and a question at the same time which would've helped other people a lot by learning how a riddle works. Seems like you narrow-minded lot lost control.

You start being reckless with the business of yours. There was not a single question from any of you towards me to make sure that riddle really is a riddle or not. Only assumption and big balls. In the end xnor was kind enough to talk to me...well, after the question has been closed.