# What should we do with very low quality questions?

Sometimes, very low quality questions are asked on the site, that are nevertheless within the rules for what's acceptable on the site. I'm thinking of questions like:

Print the largest square in the Fibonacci sequence. Shortest code wins.


This is just asking for a hardcoded 144. Or for another example:

Print all primes from 1 to 10. Fastest code wins.


Let's assume for the sake of the argument that these questions are not duplicates.

What often happens with these questions is that they will get a large number of answers very quickly, as people rush to be the first to answer with an obvious solution in their language of choice. I think it would be better for site quality if these questions were closed or improvement.

On other sites, a typical course of events when very low quality questions are asked is that the question is edited into something conforming to the standards of the site. With questions such as these, it doesn't seem possible to improve the questions to the expected quality without change the challenge requirements, which is frowned on on this site in general, and specifically in the case when a number of people have already answered, which is particularly problematic when the above scenario with lots of quick answers plays out.

My preferred solution would be to close such questions by giving a reason specific to PPCG, something like "This challenge is closed because it is not up to the standards of challenges on this site, please see here for our standards and here for the Sandbox." We have this, which is related, but more like suggestions than requirements.

What do other people think? Is this a problem worth addressing? Should we create such a set of standards for challenge quality and direct people to them? Is there a better way to handle this situation?

• Your examples seem to be a duplicate of an existing meta question – devRicher Dec 26 '16 at 13:37
• @devRicher I'm trying to ask about the more general question - not just hardcoded answers, but low quality questions in general. – isaacg Dec 27 '16 at 1:49
• I think "low quality" isn't the term here: it looks like you are talking about easy questions. I can't think of a good way to ensure a "minimum difficulty" for questions. – Nathan Merrill Dec 31 '16 at 0:12
• As long as they aren't downvoted, it's OK - that means the community is in favor for them. Also, many users favor easier questions, so they can answer them. – RudolfJelin Jan 4 '17 at 19:40
• Do you mean 'the smallest square in the Fibonacci sequence'? I'm pretty sure there'd be an infinite number of squares in the Fibonacci sequence, but correct me if I'm wrong. – 0WJYxW9FMN Jan 4 '17 at 21:06
• @J843136028 math.stackexchange.com/questions/1012999/… – isaacg Jan 5 '17 at 4:34
• @isaacg Thank you! That's really interesting. – 0WJYxW9FMN Jan 5 '17 at 16:52