What is the policy on asking questions on ongoing competitions hosted on other sites

Question

This question is closed recently because it is off-topic. It has been commented that we are not supposed to ask questions that may be coming from ongoing contests.

While sometimes it is obvious the the question is not by the asker himself and need proper attribution (For example, through text with poor formatting that is evident to be copied from somewhere else), in other cases it would not be so clear.

On second thought, it is also not clear if the asker is trying to get help from us to help him get unfair advantages in an online contest by asking an adapted version of the original challenge in the contest. It may not be necessary to develop a definition of what is an adapted version though, and the general rule "Vote to close if you think it's from a ongoing challenge" may suffice, but overall I think it is better to have something (whatever it is) in a written form to properly address the issue explicitly.

Feel free to vote to close this question if it is a duplicate.

Answer 1

I'll restate my opinion that I stated in chat earlier:

Assuming no copyright infringement issues, there is no firm policy other than "use your best judgment". We don't want to compromise the integrity of external contests, but we also don't want to turn away valid challenges.

There is no rule against posting challenges from external sites, so long as you aren't breaking any copyright/IP law. If it is a valid challenge according to our rules, it's fine. It is the responsibility of the users to respect the rules of other sites, and to respect the integrity of ongoing challenges. We cannot be expected to police our site according to the rules of other sites.