60
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." ...
25
No. I don't think the site's scope has changed, and I disagree with the closing of that question - especially the reason behind the closing. Questions about puzzles are still perfectly acceptable here. I think this problem was simply a misguided user voting to close, and other people following suit.
19
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 ...
17
A CLOSE VOTE IS NOT A SUPER-DOWNVOTE.
Sorry for shouting. But this is a really important point which far too many people apparently fail to grasp.
Downvotes are used at the discretion of the individual voter, and mean "this is a bad question". They can reflect the voter's opinion of the quality of the question, rather than any objective criteria. You can ...
16
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 ...
15
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 ...
14
As GPR noted, we already were discussing a custom close reason for this; I'm very much in favor of having one, and just hadn't gotten around to posting here about creating one and what it should look like.
My standard blurb reads:
I'm putting this question on hold until proper attribution of its original source is provided. —
It looks like you're ...
12
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 ...
11
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,...
10
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 ...
10
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'...
10
How I'd answer your questions:
Question of consistency: Is there something about this puzzle that lands it in the same bin as a mathematics “problem” vs puzzle?
Sort of. I admit when I first read it, I thought you were merely asking us to explain a natural phenomenon you'd observed, which I think is why some people thought that Physics SE was a better ...
9
No. I don't think we should. We get things that are blatantly homework fairly frequently, and taking away that close reason would only mean that we'd use the custom close reason option to close the questions anyway.
That being said, I do think we need to more precisely define what a "math problem" as opposed to a "math puzzle" is. The ...
9
If you mean on Stack Overflow, I don't know whether anyone there makes a puzzle/problem distinction or how they make it, and I don't think it's something on which PSE folks can usefully comment.
If you mean here on Puzzling, the principle would be the same as for mathematical questions. It's pretty well expressed in this answer by xnor. Something is a ...
9
I'm not sure that the possibility of multiple equally likely answers is enough to declare a question definitively off-topic. There are sometimes answers that are very clearly correct -- in questions that do satisfy this, there's no reason to declare them off-topic a priori.
But... I do see some problems with them that make me believe: yes, we should declare ...
9
These are the drafts I’ve come up with. Please comment with any improvements (and please don’t edit this post directly without consensus). Are there any other meta posts that might need to be summarized/linked here? (The links I’ve added are relatively recent ones because, well, that’s what I know of). See here for ideas.
Brief description
The name shown to ...
7
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, ...
7
I think this close reason is useful, and I've used it a bunch of times on puzzles-but-not-really where many people post different solutions and the asker says "nope, not what I was thinking" or "the answer is more clever than that".
I believe it can be worded more clearly though to address challenge questions, but still remain general. Here's what I propose....
7
(This is one of three answers intended to provide alternatives. Please vote on all three as you see fit.)
As Rubio explains in comments to the meta question about introducing this close reason, we have only a limited number of characters for the description of a close reason, and the message we have crams about as much in as possible. However, we have five ...
7
No, this shouldn't be a close reason.
Each individual SE site's scope and policies should exist in a vacuum, separate from other sites. Of course there are some network-wide policies which we have to follow since we're using SE's platform (although even some of those aren't applied for Puzzling specifically), but otherwise we should be able to decide our own ...
6
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 ...
6
I saw (and answered) your first programming puzzle. I think it's a good start, and it does fit better on Puzzling than on Code Golf, which moved away from Puzzling-style challenges (those that have one or small number of intended answers). However, as a long-term challenge setter on Code Golf, I have some advice for you (and other potential programming ...
6
Yes, this kind of "attribution" should be OK.
I've long tried to remind PSE that the definition of plagiarism requires passing someone else's work off as your own. If you make clear that you didn't create the puzzle yourself, then that should be OK. There's no false pretence going on, the OP has provided as much information as they have, and the ...
5
I would not say that makes the puzzle too broad. On a site like StackOverflow, there could easily be two different and equally good and valid answers to a given question, so I don't see why it should be any different here.
The problem with too broad is when the problem is either insufficiently defined, or too open-ended to be able to definitively say ...
5
Why would we need a custom close reason?
If we're talking about puzzles which have too few details to be solvable, then there's an existing close reason which works just fine:
unclear what you're asking
Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what ...
5
It gets tiresome to write a custom off-topic reason...
In my eyes, that's not the main issue. The main issue is that currently, because we don't have that custom close reason, these questions are getting put on hold with a close reason that doesn't actually explain what's wrong with the question (the one about "This question does not appear to be about ...
5
As mods, we were just discussing the need for a new custom close reason, and were about to bring it up, but you beat us to the punch.
I think we do need a custom close reason for this particular topic. There are two changes I would suggest to your draft above:
1) Take out the "This puzzle is put on hold..." at the beginning. This is a close reason, so it'...
5
Why do we care about attribution?
Very simply, we don’t want to host plagiarism on the site. Any puzzle which you yourself did not make must be properly attributed. (Attribution of “I made this puzzle” is of course permitted.) We enforce this policy with a site-specific close reason, used whenever the sourcing information is not within our standards. There ...
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