23
votes
Accepted
What are these chatrooms with names like 'Codenames', 'Contact', and 'Spyfall'? What are they for?
They're for playing puzzley games in real time.
Each of them has a pinned message to explain the rules of the game. Anyone is welcome to take part, and the room owners tend to be people who are ...
- 114k
20
votes
Accepted
Should we delete answers that contain no explanation?
I think it's important to comment first and give the authors some time to fix their answers before deleting them. Last night I went through one particularly problematic question and posted such a ...
- 2,780
14
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Cipher Tools
Rumkin has a pretty neat collection of cipher tools for both encrypting and decrypting
Vigenere Cipher Codebreaker can solve vigenere ciphers with or without the key. (You will need ...
13
votes
What are these chatrooms with names like 'Codenames', 'Contact', and 'Spyfall'? What are they for?
Spyfall
Overview
Spyfall is best played with 4 or more players.
All players are in some location. This could be a circus tent, a space station, a theater, etc. Each player is also assigned a role ...
- 1,914
13
votes
What are these chatrooms with names like 'Codenames', 'Contact', and 'Spyfall'? What are they for?
Codenames
Overview
Codenames has an espionage setting, in which players in teams try to identify their own team's secret agents, based on their agents' code names. Codenames is a game of guessing ...
12
votes
What are these chatrooms with names like 'Codenames', 'Contact', and 'Spyfall'? What are they for?
Contact
Overview
Contact requires at least three people, one person to create a word and at least two people to guess it. The word creator thinks of a word and gives the guessers the first letter. ...
- 114k
12
votes
Accepted
“Proper attribution” for non-original puzzles: a guide
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”...
10
votes
What is PSE's policy on mathematical questions, and why, and what's the history behind it?
Policy
First of all, if all you want is our actual policy then
you can find it in this question:
Proposed policy on mathematical questions
The policy described there is, briefly:
A question is off-...
- 111k
10
votes
Should we delete answers that contain no explanation?
Assuming we want explanations (and I believe we do), this is probably the only way it's going to get enforced. Downvoting works very well when there's a culture of it, but not so well if you're the ...
- 6,524
8
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Word Tools
Litscape has an extensive list of words finding tools (for example pattern matching, words containing or made from certain letters, single word anagrams, etc)
Ceptimus Word Ladder solver, ...
8
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Number Tools
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is useful for puzzles involving integer sequences
Base Converter converts between binary, decimal, hexadecimal and ASCII
Calculator Soup ...
8
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Graphics Tools
RGB Color Wheel correlates colors to RGB (#RRGGBB and 255-255-255) and HSV ( °-%-%)
GIF-Explode is a web-tool to show individual frames ...
7
votes
Accepted
Encoded comments
The point of encoded comments is to avoid spoilering the answer for someone who, say, accidentally scrolls down while looking at a puzzle. It's the same reason that we use spoiler markup in answers.
...
- 8,417
6
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Puzzle Tools
Chess board editor is an online interactive chessboard with PGN viewer and editor
Sudoku Solver is a fully featured sudoku solver by Andrew Stuart
Qhex Puzzle Tools contains a wide array ...
6
votes
How not to be a spammer (redux)
This is an answer to the OP's question "Whose content is it, anyway?".
I also want to make an important clarification to the OP's statement that "roughly, this (the use of the CC-by-SA ...
- 4,531
6
votes
Can I post a puzzle I found on the internet?
You can. That doesn't necessarily mean you should.
There's more to Puzzling.SE than puzzles posted as challenges for others to try to solve. While it's definitely true that these puzzle challenges ...
RubioMod
- 40.1k
6
votes
Should we delete answers that contain no explanation?
Yes, we should enforce explanations in answers. With downvotes and a comment linking to a faq meta post first, then deletion if the user refuses to fix the problem. Ultimately, though, to convey that ...
5
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Geography Tools
Measure Distance on a Map measures the distance and travel time between two places, with many options such as snapping to road or not, mode of transport (including different levels of ...
5
votes
A collection of Puzzling Tools
Useful Information Sources
Telephone Dialing Codes for countries, and also shows their flags
Internet Movie DataBase for film and TV references
Runes - for all things runey
Wolfram|Alpha - ...
2
votes
How not to be a spammer (redux)
Johnny has had ten girlfriends in the past five years. He decides to plot them as a scatter plot, then arbitrarily derive them as functions of time. If Johnny had each girlfriend for a minimum of six ...
- 16.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible