How to proceed with "Airline tickets puzzle strategy"

Question

Today I asked Airline tickets puzzle strategy, which has been closed now. The reasons I received were:

1. I was alleged to be cheating

   In response to that I would like to cite where I took this question from. As you can observe, this question was asked in the 2011 exam, which is about a decade ago, and there is no decent explanation available anywhere, so my motive was to have a healthy discussion about it.

2. Secondly I am told that this is a mathematical puzzle, but I feel this is more of strategy, logical reasoning question, the tags for which I have already put up in my question. There is only some addition/subtraction involved, which in my opinion doesn't qualify to be asked under puzzle tag in Maths SE.

3. It's not just that I have simply put up the question and asked for the answer. I have tried to be specific on what I want to ask and also provided the info of what I was thinking while solving this problem

4. I really don't understand how this puzzle is of no use. In fact I would like to point here that if one carefully reads this, it resembles a problem faced in reality.

5. I respect the decisions of mods always and have abided by the rules, but I am not at all satisfied with their reasons for closing this question.

I would ask the authorities to look into this matter and guide me to a resolution.

Answer 1

PSE gets an annoyingly large number of questions from people who are very clearly trying to cheat on aptitude tests. It is possible that I was too hasty in guessing that this was one of them. But consider the warning signs:

• The question was very obviously taken pretty directly from some sort of examination or aptitude test.

  • These are usually (and I think this one is no exception) very uninteresting as puzzles. No one is going to have any fun answering this question. Nor is it of any practical use. The only reason anyone would be trying to answer it is for the sake of one of these tests. (Not necessarily trying to cheat; it might be trying to prepare honestly for taking such tests in the future. But PSE isn't an aptitude test preparation service any more than it's an aptitude test cheating service.)

• The question was posted with no indication at all of its origin.

  • I would expect someone who isn't trying to cheat on anything but just wants an honest discussion to say where the thing came from. It's actually official policy that you must do this; see e.g. https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/help/referencing, Is it acceptable to copy and paste questions from other sites?, A policy on plagiarism. And this sort of source information is often useful too: the context may make it easier to figure out, e.g., what whoever posed the problem in the first place is likely to be looking for.

The fact that the question is old (which I confess I didn't check) is no guarantee of honest intentions, though; surely questions like this get reused sometimes.

However: I concede that I was only guessing that you were trying to cheat on an aptitude test. I may have guessed wrong.

There were, I'm afraid, other reasons for closing the question. (The process of closing requires us to specify just one.)

• It was posted without any indication of where it came from. As already mentioned, you're not allowed to do that here: creators of puzzles (even bad ones) deserve credit for their work. Of course, that can be fixed by editing the question to say exactly where it's from.
• It is also official policy here that we don't allow puzzles whose creators have asked them not to be shared. It seems unlikely that the source you cited is actually the original source of the puzzle, but the text bobble quoted indicates that they, at least, specifically instruct readers not to post their material elsewhere.
• It's really not a puzzle in any useful sense, so far as I can tell. I can't summon up the patience to read its wall of text in full detail, but it looks as if either (1) if you go through and parse all the details one of the options is demonstrably better than the others (in which case it's basically mathematics, just very boring mathematics, and would be closed as being a mathematics problem rather than a puzzle) or else (2) you're being asked to exercise your judgement about something like "would I rather have £100 or an airline ticket whose nominal value is £200 but for a trip I might not actually want to take?" (in which case it's just not a puzzle and would be closed as "opinion-based").

So, if I were to reopen the question as "maybe not a mathematical problem after all", my next action would be to close it again as "a puzzle you found elsewhere without proper citation of its source".

If you edited into it the link given in this question, then (aside from my concern that that's clearly not the actual origin of the question) I might reopen it since it would then be properly attributed -- but I would then immediately have to close it again as "a puzzle whose creator has asked for it not to be shared".

If you got permission from the relevant people to post it here, then maybe it would be necessary to figure out the intended solution and whether it's actually a matter of calculation or judgement; and then we would immediately have to close it again either as "mathematical problem not puzzle" (after all) or "opinion-based".

What I don't see is any plausible way that it remains open. It just isn't the sort of thing PSE is for.