What should our standards be for on-topic challenge questions?

Question

A lot of users, like me, came to Puzzling.SE because we thought of it as a place that would become equivalent to PCG.SE, but for non-programming puzzles and that would coexist with a place to ask questions about puzzles rather than just for challenges.

Of course, our lack of clarity on what our standards are, along with a lack of a regular community to enforce those standards, is causing us to accumulate a glut of questions that most of us just sort of know are unsuitable for the site, but we can't seem to determine why except that they're low quality.

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Recently, the issue has flared up on meta, and one of the answers pointed out that we still don't have a clear, unambiguous definition of what sorts of questions-as-challenges are on-topic.

While we've had closed-ended questions about whether specific types of puzzles are on-topic or not, I thought I'd create a unified space to decide on what types of puzzles are on-topic here.

Answer 1

Most of the ideas in this post have been shamelessly stolen from other Meta posts.

I suggest we emulate the behaviors of the following SE sites:

1. Programmers
2. StackOverflow
3. CodeReview
4. Code Golf

What I mean by this is we allow the same type of questions except in relation to puzzles rather than coding.

1. Programmers: When you're at the whiteboard => Question about puzzles in general

   This isn't an exact mirror, but questions about puzzles should be on-topic. Here are a few questions that fit in this category:

   What are the criteria for determining the difficulty of Sudoku puzzle?

   In iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, how would a change in the payoff matrix affect strategy?

2. Stack Overflow: When you're coding => When you need help solving a puzzle

   This is mainly for mass-producible puzzles but it could work for others as well. You must post the puzzle, what you have attempted so far, and what specific problem you are having. If you just post a crossword or sudoku puzzle and nothing else, then it should be downvoted, closed, and ultimately deleted.

   These types of questions will most likely get the most downvotes and close votes because just like on StackOverflow, many people won't follow the rules.

3. Code Review => Help creating a puzzle

   You have created a puzzle. You wish to make sure that your puzzle doesn't have many possible answers because of some ambiguity or you want to make sure your puzzle isn't too easy or hard. Or perhaps you need advice on how to add one final clue to lead your users to an answer (or to throw them off). The key to this category is that we should avoid questions that are basically "please make me a puzzle".

4. Code Golf => Fun and games

   This will probably be the bulk of the questions on this site. For this category, we need to have a strict set of rules.

   -No mass producible puzzles

   -It is the responsibility of the OP to provide enough context and information so that a single unambiguous solution can be found (or as few solutions as possible). A question that does not provide enough information (like this one) should be downvoted and closed.

   -All answers must provide explanations. If somebody posted a riddle, your answer better explain how each line fits your solution.

   -Each puzzle should be a self-contained post. All of the information required to solve the puzzle must be in the post. In other words, a reader should not have to re-read part 25 of your puzzle in another post. Multi-post (puzzles with a part 1, part 2, ..., part 30) puzzles should be discouraged or there should be a limit of perhaps 2-3 parts.

   -Probably more restrictions

Overall, this might make the scope of puzzling.se too broad, but I don't think it would.

Answer 2

My suggestion:

On-topic: All types of puzzle except PPCG and chess.

• Why should we exclude any type of puzzle except for the reason that there already exists a better place on SE to discuss it?

• I don't buy the idea that some genres of puzzle are inherently superior to other genres. Sure, some are harder than others, but if we wanted to exclude easy puzzles then that's not specific to genre.

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Update:

• I agree with Joe that mass-produced puzzles should be out of scope. If one just copies a puzzle and keeps the same idea while changing a few details, that's dull.

• But I don't agree that any particular genre of puzzle is particularly vulnerable to this (more than other genres). I'm pretty sure I can make a nearly-but-not-quite copy of a puzzle in any genre.

• Excluding all language-based puzzles? Wow. Big step. That would really cut out everything except maths puzzles, which could just as well be on maths.SE. So then what would be the point of puzzling.SE?

One can of course deal with low-quality questions by just giving them a low score - downvoting them or refraining from upvoting them - instead of ruling them off-topic. Isn't that how the system is meant to work?

Answer 3

Here are my personal thoughts on the matter.

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My vision of this Stack Exchange is, as I pointed out in the answer above, is a place where people can post interesting puzzles and get interesting answers for them, like PCG.SE but for regular puzzles.

To that end, here are some of the puzzle types that I would consider to be unsuitable for this site (and therefore believe should be declared off-topic):

Mass-producible puzzles

Mass-producible puzzles are puzzles of a specific type that can be produced in large quantities and have a small set of common shared strategies for solving.

I believe that these puzzles are unsuitable simply because there are too many of them, and if too many questions of a single type flood the site, as we saw with the party security questions, the site rapidly becomes uninteresting.

Riddles and language-based puzzles

Riddles, and other puzzles that depend on language (interpreting sentences of words and their phrasing in order to extract meaning from them), have too much inherent potential for ambiguity and inclarity.

This includes lateral thinking puzzles that depends on some quirk in the wording to arrive at the answer. However, it does not include puzzles that make use of just the letters in words in a specific way; I'm specifically talking about morphology and semantics.

This might lead one to believe that only puzzles with a mathematical abstraction are acceptable. I would say it's certainly a good rule of thumb, although a few exceptions might be made.

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Of course, questions about the above puzzle types would still be on-topic.

I must emphasize that I'm not excluding the above puzzle types because they're somehow inherently worse. But even on PCG.SE, not all programming puzzles are suitable for Stack Exchange. I had my own experience with that trying to format a king-of-the-hill puzzle on PCG.SE; eventually there were just too many bugs with the format for the verification systems I had in place to be viable. While the question wasn't closed because of it, I would not try and do it again.

Some people believe that this site should strictly be a "Puzzle Theory" Q&A site, in which only such questions about puzzles are asked. If you believe this should be the case, then of course you would believe that none of these puzzles-as-challenges are on-topic, and the question is meaningless. However, I'd have to admit that my own activity would decrease dramatically on such a site, because it would no longer be what I see the site as being.