Duplicate questions

Question

Now I know that duplicate questions are bad, but because this is a programming puzzles site, should there be a time range after which puzzles can be asked again?

Reason one is that new users who missed out on old questions may enjoy solving them, and old users might enjoy attempting to improve their old answer or writing a new one in a different language, as long as there is a long enough time range between the questions.

Reason two is that after a while, we will run out of puzzles to ask, and then the site will die.

At the minimum, there should be 2 to 3 years since the last activity on the old question to allow a duplicate question, but what do you users think about allowing duplicate questions after a certain time limit has passed?

Answer 1

A straight duplicate seems unnecessary, but a near-duplicate wouldn't necessarily be terrible. Do an old one with a new twist, or a more complicated scoring-system. Or more expanded, or more limited.

A priori, I think such a thing is possible to make work.

Answer 2

I'd like to advocate a more flexible policy for closing duplicates. As is, duplicate and near-duplicate questions seem to be closed as a hard rule. Of course, we don't want the same question repeated over and over. But if the new question is much better than the old one, closing it is a needless loss in quality for the site. I'd like for the duplicate policy to be more flexible, and allow a repeat of a question if the new one is significantly better than the old.

A weird situation comes up when a well-posed question is upvoted, starts getting quality answers, and then is suddenly closed because someone discovers an old link to a similar question. Is this really serving the community interest? It's sad when someone posts a well thought-out, exactly-specified, test-cased question, and it's closed because the same challenge was posed in a question from 2011 with an ambiguous two-sentence spec and only a few mediocre answers.

With the current policy on duplicates, that challenge can never be posed again. Anyone who was not on the site at the time misses out on that topic forever. A good question that was ruined by an loophole never gets a second chance.

At this point, someone is sure to object, "But you can just answer the old question or edit it to improve it!" I think that this is a romantic view that it's simply not realistic.

If you answer a question from many years ago, chance are barely anyone will see it. You might as well submit it to dev/null. Likewise for edits to improve an old challenge. Yes, there are some old questions that pop up perennially, but in most cases, that question and your answer or edits will fall off the front page and be forgotten. It'a vicious cycle in that even those who see it and are tempted to participating don't so as not to risk investing time in something that nobody is likely to see.

A new question is like a community agreement to focus attention on that challenge. The fun of the site is golfing/coding with other people -- commenting, upvoting, making improvements. It's a social experience. Why do people post answers rather than just leaving the code they wrote on their computer? That's the same reason answering or editing an old question just isn't the same.

Moreover, old questions are often not up to the quality standards of modern ones. Submitting an answer to an ambiguous or flawed spec is unsatisfying. Editing an old spec to be more precise or close loopholes is unfair to existing answers. Adding a bounty doesn't get fix this either.

If there were another mechanism to resurrect old questions and improve them, with a social agreement to focus on that question for a time, I'd be all for it. But as is, if someone does the service of making a better version of an old question, intentionally or not, I think we should not throw away effort that by closing it as a duplicate.

(I also want to endorse this post by Ryan as to the lack of harm of closing duplicates.)

Answer 3

There are good reasons why duplicate questions should not be allowed in a Question and Answer site. If allowed, the information would become fragmented and people looking for answers would only see part of the answers available when searching.

The Programming Puzzle site, although built on the Stack Exchange platform, has different goals. Programmers create clever puzzles as questions and other programmers compete with solution posted as "answers". Does it matter if we have a similar or duplicate puzzle on this site? If somebody invents Monopoly and we have a great game, are we concerned when the game is brought out 6 months later for another game? We may worry that solutions may be a copy from the previous session, but is that a problem? New players will present new solutions and new ideas. The site loses nothing by revisiting a puzzle.

If the new puzzle has a few changes over the older puzzle, older solutions may be refined and adapted to the new requirement, or new solutions crafted from scratch. In either case the site will stimulate more clever solutions.

You may ask, why not just offer a solution to the old puzzle? Puzzles and their community seem to have a lifetime of a few days. After a week or two, new solutions will not be seen by many programmers as the community have moved on. When the monopoly board is brought out again, players that enjoyed the last round and new players can join in again in building clever solutions. But perhaps exact duplicates should still be discouraged. Some fresh twists in the Monopoly rules would motivate some new thinking on the solutions instead of just a copy and paste operation.

The Stack Exchange platform allows marking questions (puzzles) as duplicates and there is a culture of discouraging similar puzzles, but this a feature we should use sparingly on PPCG.

Answer 4

I know this has an accepted answer, and that kind of points to the flaw I see in the current system as set.

I've encountered a few older challenges that have accepted answers. To me, that means the challenge poster has declared a winner. No one else has a chance to win that challenge. That acts as a deterrent to people who would want to post for the sake of competition. I would propose that any challenge with an accepted answer be closed or deleted after a period of time. That allows people to recycle the question. Let newer people to the site try their hand at answering the question.

As it sits now, I see the current system as an "old boy's club" where you only have a chance at making a name for yourself if you started with the Challenges and Code Golf site. Questions are retained to both idolize the winners and ensure they keep the precious points, at the cost of allowing others to fight for the same challenge.

Deleting a challenge with an accepted answer is a good way around the issue of duplicating answers. I cannot go and get the answers from a deleted post. I have to challenge myself.

Ultimately, I look at it like this:

Jane posts the challenge "Walk to the corner and back." A month later Bill posts "Walk to the corner and back, backwards" A year later Joe posts "Walk to the corner and back on your hands."

All these are similar. Any response to Bill or Joe could be posted to Jane. Some responses to Jane could be posted to Bill or Joe. Therefore, Bill and Joe are considered duplicates., and they shouldn't be. They introduce a new aspect to the challenge that some people might want to consider. Walking to the corner and back is too easy, but I don't have the balance to walk on my hands. I'll try the backwards option.