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." ...
41
Heck yeah.
We the users probably have no idea what we have just decided to download until the download is finish. The file(s) could be filled with viruses or malware that we do not need on our precious computers. Files that are needed to be download cannot be trusted unless approved by someone we know and trust and/or the source code is revealed, which can ...
41
No. Please no. This is a really bad idea.
Requiring riddles to pass through a sandbox on meta before being permitted on the main site is going to encourage cliquishness and in-crowdery and alienate new users. Here are some of the biggest problems (in my view) with the new scheme:
It prevents new users from participating. Essentially, it does. If you're a ...
38
Increase the value of an upvote for a question.
Currently, an upvote on a question provides only half the reputation that an upvote on an answer does. (5 reputation vs. 10 reputation.)
This would see the amount of reputation provided by each upvote increased to 10 or perhaps even higher (do we value questions more than answers?).
Pros
No cost ...
27
Independently of any security concern, questions on Stack Exchange are supposed to be self-contained. You can print out a question and it should still make sense.
If the question doesn't make sense without downloading extra material, whether that material is a program or extra images, text, etc. then the question is not fit for Stack Exchange can should be ...
23
Totally agree with both of Rand's answers, however, I think we need to hone in a little on what the new close reason should be, so I thought I'd add my thoughts...
New close reason
See Rand's answer for reasoning/precedent, however, I believe the text should be a little different. The primary aim should be to catch/close low quality content, which can be ...
22
In this base-10 alphametic, each letter represents a different digit and numbers can't start with 0. What digit does each letter represent?
I
+ U
---
WE
Hint:
That's terrible style. A hint is supposed to be optional, but in this example the "hint" is necessary because someone solving the puzzle without it would find it completely impossible to end up ...
21
How do we move past rand's suspension? It's simple, really. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time we make room for the new king of Puzzling.SE: Bailey M.
Please, hold your applause.
[End unofficial block.]
Guys, this sucks. We all know it sucks. Rand posted a lot of sweet math puzzles (which I cannot for the life of me solve nor imitate in any real fashion) as ...
21
Implement "bounties" for questions that can be awarded instantaneously.
This would be a method where one user could transfer some reputation to another user to reward them for an exemplary question. Some checks and balances would need to be in place to avoid this facility being abused for the purposes of reputation sharing. (Perhaps several privileged ...
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
This puzzle
Now that the puzzle in question has been solved, it seems to me that it really was just a gimmick without much value. As far as I can tell this puzzle could exist entirely as-is on the main question page. I think this is a poor choice because:
It doesn't add anything of value to the real puzzle.
It requires that a user understand revision ...
17
There are two reasons your post was heavily downvoted:
Yes, this community generally dislikes progressive matrices. As you said, "it's similar to reading the author's mind" -- this is the mark of a bad puzzle. A good puzzle should have a path to the solution "built in" in some way - a bad one requires you to just try things until you happen to guess ...
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 ...
16
A further consideration is that even if this download is perfectly safe and innocuous, but this puzzle leads to a common acceptance of similar puzzles that involve downloads, there is a chance that a malicious individual may see an opportunity to post a link to something harmful dressed up as a puzzle in the future.
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 ...
15
Losing the top user on a site is, unfortunately, not unprecedented. Whether because of death or life circumstances (I'm pleased to see I'm no longer the top user on Hermeneutics) or for reasons unknown, people stop contributing to a site they've previously been active in. While we can't know for sure how these events set a site back, we can say that sites ...
15
Good riddles are an awesome addition to the site. Low quality puzzles, of any type, are not good for the site.
The problem, as I see it, is twofold:
Making a good riddle is hard, but making a mediocre one is really easy (to make matters worse, it can be hard to tell if something is good until it has been answered, so lots of mediocre content gets produced ...
14
I consider those questions to be really boring, unimaginative, low-quality riddles and downvote them accordingly.
Update
My view has evolved; down voting them isn't working, we're getting more and more of them and they're drowning out higher quality content.
I now believe we should close these questions and have requested a custom close reason.
Rq custom ...
14
This may not make a huge difference, but since new users are often high on the blame list for the poor-quality stuff, we should
change the Puzzling Tour to actually reflect this site.
I think this is probably a low-effort but some-reward step we could take, so why not do it. If you don't think it needs to be changed, go take the Puzzling Tour right now and ...
14
Without commenting on any of the specific examples you've included, I don't think a simple satellite photo with "where is this place?" constitutes a puzzle.
This type of thing has much more in common with trivia questions than with puzzles (and community consensus has already found trivia questions to be off topic). That is, you either know the location or ...
12
We must define what is on-topic in a clear unambiguous fashion. I haven't been around all that long, however every discussion I've seen about what's on-topic has been very ambiguous and I'm still not remotely clear about what the story is. Indeed, the consensus in meta is often internally inconsistent. I argue that any definition of quality will need the ...
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 ...
12
Titles
What happened in Area 51:
In Area 51, the example questions have no bodies, so they must be entirely self-contained only in the title.
Most puzzles and riddles are impossible to be crammed to a single title. At least for me, I discarded some questions simply because I found no way to reduce them to only a title.
In order to cram the most content in ...
12
No, they aren't.
Firstly, despite what you suggest, the test of time and votes does correlate with the test of puzzle quality. Even back in the spaghetti era when low-quality puzzles were often getting a lot of upvotes, a succession of puzzles of the same type would usually have strictly decreasing scores unless some of the later ones were really really ...
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,...
11
Implement bounties for questions that work the same as the current "exemplary answer" bounties for answers.
We would use the current bounty facilities, but when placing a bounty, you would be given both options (along with all the other existing options):
Reward existing answer
One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.
...
11
I will now try to formulate a loose summary for the riddle tag since I'm usually committing crimes under its flag. I hope I can restore its reputation and atone for my sins:
(I will try to improve this summary now and then)
Reasons for writing a riddle:
I enjoy the process of writing riddles
I have a good idea what my riddles will be about
I've ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible