I'm proposing we do a major clean-up of this tag.

This will require a lot of work - there are 147 questions! - and that's probably why it didn't happen before. But these puzzles are causing harm by continually accruing answers, the exact reason they were declared off-topic in the first place. (Also, the fact that no clean-up happened irks my sense of wanting things to be neat and tidy)

We'll need people to look through the questions. Think about each carefully. There are a few things that might be called for:

• This question isn't an open-ended question at all.
  • If it's actually optimization, puzzle-creation, etc. adjust the tags for that.
  • Or maybe the tag doesn't make sense, like this puzzle where I edited out the tag as it was plain wrong.
  • Don't just edit out the tag and leave. Look for more things to improve within the question.
• This question is open-ended
  • It looks like the community didn't care about it (low score/few answers) ⟶ vote/flag to close as "speculative answers"
  • It looks like the community liked it (high score/many answers) ⟶ ping/flag down a mod to see if it warrants a historical lock

Above all, coordinate. We probably don't want to flood the front page with all these questions at once, and discussing which category a particular question falls into would be well done in chat.

The tag can be left behind, as a useful way of grouping these old questions, but any new questions with the tag should either be closed or gently directed into fixing themselves to be on-topic.

I'm proposing we do a major clean-up of this tag.

This will require a lot of work - there are 147 questions! - and that's probably why it didn't happen before. But these puzzles are causing harm by continually accruing answers, the exact reason they were declared off-topic in the first place. (Also, the fact that no clean-up happened irks my sense of wanting things to be neat and tidy)

We'll need people to look through the questions. Think about each carefully. There are a few things that might be called for:

• This question isn't an open-ended question at all.
  • If it's actually optimization, puzzle-creation, etc. adjust the tags for that.
  • Or maybe the tag doesn't make sense, like this puzzle where I edited out the tag as it was plain wrong.
  • Don't just edit out the tag and leave. Look for more things to improve within the question.
• This question is open-ended
  • It looks like the community didn't care about it (low score/few answers) ⟶ vote/flag to close as "speculative answers"
  • It looks like the community liked it (high score/many answers) ⟶ ping/flag down a mod to see if it warrants a historical lock (not needed since I don't think people are VTD'ing these anyhow)

Above all, coordinate. We probably don't want to flood the front page with all these questions at once, and discussing which category a particular question falls into would be well done in chat.

The tag can be left behind, as a useful way of grouping these old questions, but any new questions with the tag should either be closed or gently directed into fixing themselves to be on-topic.