We need to take an official stance on code trolling

Question

Here's our to-do list for the project:

• Close all existing code-trolling questions (or maybe re-tag those three I mentioned).
  • status-declined - if locked or deleted, closing might not matter, so we may or may not close them all first
• Lock all the more popular ones (>20 answers or >20 upvotes, say). Put the "kept around for historical significance" message on them. That's the key really.
• Do delete the rest (although I personally wouldn't even mind if we just leave them all as signposts).
  • status-completed - here's our plan:
    • if the question has more than 50% "keep" votes on the spreadsheet, lock it
    • if the question has more than 75% "delete" votes, kill it with fire
    • otherwise, decide manually, taking into consideration votes (especially posts with 25+ votes), answer count, and community input in chat
• Change the code-trolling tag wiki to read "This tag is kept around for historical reasons. Questions of this type are not considered a good fit for this site, so rethink your challenge if you wanted to use this tag."
  • status-completed - someone appears to have already done this
• Strongly discourage all future code-trolling posts by closing (and subsequently deleting) them with reference to the tag wiki or this meta discussion.
• If an interesting/good code troll does come up, figure out why it's good, build on that - and sort it into another appropriate tag (most likely some variant of popularity contest). Because most likely, the good thing about will not be something inherent to code trolling.
  • N/A - we will do this for all code-trolling posts in the future

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I've noticed a very troubling pattern going on with code trolling.

"No, really?" you say sarcastically, but I've noticed something... different, something that has some potential to be fixed.

First, let me present the obvious problem with code trolling:

People are upvoting them.

Don't.

I'm not saying I can tell people how they can and can not use their votes, but these questions are way way way way way way too broad.

Let's take a look at them. The first one boils down to "make something related to square roots." The second basically says "do something with complex numbers." They're both essentially saying this:

Write some code. Any code. Don't worry about what it does. Just put (square roots / complex numbers) somewhere in there and you'll be fine.

That is completely utterly absolutely positively undoubtedly too broad.

This is a huge problem. It's a vicious circle. Some people within PPCG upvote them. (Here's the problem. They upvote and answer instead of voting to close like they should.) Mountains of answers pile up. Then these questions shoot up through the Hot Network Questions list. They get piles of upvotes and answers on and on and then new users jump in and think these are good challenges.

If we're going to say these are good, then I might as well just go and post this:

Your challenge is to write some code. The only restriction is that it must contain at least three multiplications. Good luck!

So, could we please close and delete these, instead of pushing the quality bar lower and lower?

Anyway, now that we've established this, these are the bad code trolling posts. This does not mean to close all code trolling posts. "Good" code trolling posts may or may not exist. This is where our community is divided. So, after all this rambling, here's the point of this post.

What do we think about code trolling?

Here are our options:

• we do not want any code-trolling posts outright. They are all bad because foo and bar. (Please provide examples.) Kill them. With FIRE.
• there exist some good code-trolling posts. (Example foo, example bar.) To make a good code trolling post, it should have foo and bar.
• code-trolling is good because foo and bar. We should leave it as is, but maybe just have a few more rules for it (like foo and bar).

Can we finally figure this out?

Answer 1

TL;DR: Get rid of code trolling - in a reasonable way and for the benefit of the community.

I am not a fan of code-trolling, but I thought I'd give this tag a fair trial. So instead of just saying "I don't like it, code trolling is the worst, delete ALL the questions", I'll try to justify my position as best I can. (We tried the other tactic before and it didn't help).

Are there any good code trolling questions?

So first, I really wanted to figure out what makes a good code trolling question (if such a thing exists). Because if there is such a thing, then all we need to do is clearly express what makes a good code troll and simply weed out the bad ones. So I went through all 24 code trolling questions. I found exactly three noteworthy ones:

• The original: This one was good and fun because it was a novel idea. In that sense this is only one particular (and at the time interesting) case of a popularity-contest.
• Multiplication without + and *: This is interesting because it has a really clear spec. However, the actual point is that the code-trolling tag on this question seems entirely pointless. This is just a popularity contest with a strong restriction on the allowed implementations. In fact, we have a restricted-source tag for that.
• Trolling the troll: As opposed to most other code trolling questions, this one actually attests the reader of the code some intelligence, and requires that the code looks like malware while being harmless - you're not going to get away with obvious obfuscations here. But that's nothing more than an underhanded challenge.

So what these three good (?) code trolling questions have in common is that they are really just popularity contests. The only one of them that is really related to code trolling is the first one, but if it's the only actually good such question, then "code trolling" as a challenge type is not a thing.

_{An honourable mention goes to drawing the trololologram. This one was also heavily disputed but at heart there is an interesting idea (which is also not inherently related to code trolling): devising a challenge with rules that make it "obviously" impossible to solve such that the challenge consists in finding loopholes. However, we all know how much we like recurring exploitation of loopholes here, so something like that can also be funny once (tops).}

So what's so bad about the other 20 questions? Basically they are all the same. They all take a bad question from SO (or make one up), and post it with the code-trolling tag as a one-line - sometimes they add a second line to ridicule the original poster over on SO. All of these could reasonably be closed as "too broad" without any aversion against code trolling whatsoever. Why? Because code trolling can be interpreted in any of a myriad ways (underhanded, misinterpret task, write broken code, write illegible code, write bad-practice code...) such that the only restriction that remains on submissions is that the answerer somehow has to figure out how he can claim that the program is related to the question. At the same time, while they may be fun, they don't even provide a puzzle due to the lack of an actual objective/restriction. That does make them somewhat off-topic here, too.

So maybe it is possible to post a good code trolling question, but I don't know because it hasn't been done yet.

Well that just screams for "delete ALL the code trolling questions", right? Wait, let's look at the other side as well.

"But they are popular!"

The most common (only?) argument for keeping code trolling around is "because it's popular" (and the secondary arguments following that like "we need more traffic", "more questions spawn more answers, which might be interesting"). Yes, code trolling questions frequently make it into the Hot Network Questions and they get a good amount of answers and upvotes from time to time. But just because it's popular that doesn't mean it's a good kind of question for this site. Even "because it may generate an amazing answer from time to time" doesn't mean it's a good kind of question for this site.

"But this is a community-driven site! If it gets so many upvotes, the community wants it, and it should stay!" Or should it? The StackExchange network prides itself in its high-quality content. In any case quality over quantity. StackOverflow doesn't accept duplicates or "I haven't done my homework" questions (those would certainly increase the volume tremendously), because they want relevant questions first and foremost. This is the most important thing and it does regularly include alienating the odd new user who just wanted a quick "give me teh codez" to solve his problem. (Ironically these are exactly the people fans of code trolling are making fun of.) But that's fine because users (trolls) who can't accept that the StackExchange network is for high-quality content only and just want to have some fun are not the target audience here. There are places for such content, but it's not SE. (Reddit, maybe? I don't know.)

Again, I thought I'd rather back that previous paragraph up with some actual examples. There are both list-type and fun questions on StackOverflow which are massively popular and have amazing (and even useful) answers. Nevertheless, they are strongly discouraged and new similar questions will be violently closed and deleted. Some examples of such questions:

• A list of good books on C++: This one is not even closed because it's so tremendously useful. But try asking a similar "I need a list of..." question on StackOverflow and count the seconds until 5 close votes are in. In fact, SO has a close vote reason "Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam."
• And then there are these gems: funny, funnier, funniest. These all have hundreds of answers and upvotes (with some answers having over a thousand upvotes). Also, they are all closed and locked with the message "This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here."

These examples show that it is not uncommon for the SE network to rule out certain kinds of questions, despite popular demand - in the interest of the community's high quality. And the thing is: people on SO understand! And those who don't - as I said - are not the target audience.

So what should we do about code trolling?

Okay, this post is long enough, I should get to the conclusion. So? Delete ALL the code trolling questions?

No, I think we can proceed with this in a somewhat more mature way, just by looking at how SO handled those questions. So here is what I'd suggest we do:

• Close all existing code-trolling questions (or maybe re-tag those three I mentioned).
• Lock all the more popular ones (>20 answers or >20 upvotes, say). Put the "kept around for historical significance" message on them. That's the key really.
• Do delete the rest (although I personally wouldn't even mind if we just leave them all as signposts).
• Change the code-trolling tag wiki to read "This tag is kept around for historical reasons. Questions of this type are not considered a good fit for this site, so rethink your challenge if you wanted to use this tag."
• Strongly discourage all future code-trolling posts by closing (and subsequently deleting) them with reference to the tag wiki or this meta discussion.
• If an interesting/good code troll does come up, figure out why it's good, build on that - and sort it into another appropriate tag (most likely some variant of popularity contest). Because most likely, the good thing about will not be something inherent to code trolling.

If we want to hold codegolf.SE to the same high standards as the other sites in the network, we do need to have the balls to say "this is not what we want" even if it means losing a few potential new users.

PS: If someone can come up with an actual good and interesting challenge whose being good and interesting relies on it also being a code trolling question, I will be the first person to admit that keeping code trolling around might be worthwhile. However, even in that case, we need to be very clear in what makes a good code trolling question and still systematically weed out all those that don't live up those standards.

Answer 2

My personal stance is that code-trolling is awful and should by ruled against with all due haste.

Indeed if I was allowed to kill one of code-trolling and popularity-contest by simple fiat I wouldn't even hesitate.

I really only have one reason, which is that the existence of the category will continually breed bad, lazy, boring challenges without end. It's just too easy for a user who has the itch to participate (a good thing) but little experience to pop over to Stack Overflow (or almost any programming forum on the internet or troll through the usenet archive) an find yet another crap question and bang, we have another ill-specified, poorly thought out piece of dreck challenge.

Kill them with fire.

Answer 3

TL;DR re-tag good questions as underhanded, then get rid of code-trolling

I'm finding it impossible to defend this tag any longer. I was going to cite Trolling the troll as a good example of the genre, but this question was re-tagged as underhanded in an edit by xfix a couple of days ago. This seems like a good idea. If there are any code-trolling questions that can't be retagged as underhanded, they probably belong in /r/shittyprogramming, not here.

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Another suggestion:

If we don't reach an immediate consensus, could we at least start by doing something about the tag wiki? This is what users currently see when posting a new question:

"The task is to give code that works, but is useless, severely frustrating the OP."

This is one of the shortest tag summaries we have, and gives no indication of any of the problems people have been raising in meta discussions. To see the rules that actually address these problems, the user would have to follow the "learn more" link, then scroll down to the bottom of the page. I would imagine that most [code-trolling] questions are being asked by people who are completely unaware of these rules.

I suggest expanding the opening paragraph to something like this:

code-trolling

The task is to give code that works, but is useless, severely frustrating the OP. Please read the guidelines carefully before posting a new code-trolling question. In particular, questions that are too broad are liable to be closed on sight.

(The remainder of the wiki looks OK to me)

Answer 4

TL;DR: Close, but don't delete popular code-trolling questions. Discourage future questions. Please notice the significant division between meta and codegolf itself.

Disclaimer: I personally like code-trolling as a fun, creative and recreational way to programming. I wrote a code-trolling question with 21 votes which is a deletion candidate, as well as a code-trolling answer with a few votes. I came to this site in the first place precisely because of code-trolling.

1. Let me note that obviously, the average site user seems to think differently than the average meta user, as is clearly reflected in the amount of upvotes of some popular code-trolling questions and answers. There are some really funny, creative and interesting answers and it would be a loss for the site if they were deleted and no harm to keep them. Many users like me might be pissed off by just deleting them. Keep in mind that only a small proportion actually uses meta and might not even be aware of this discussion. The negative impact of code-trolling on this site is overrated in my opinion.
2. All the interesting questions in code-trolling seem to have been asked, and all the interesting answers have been given, some of them multiple times (such as code obfuscation with C #defines and overuse of JQuery). It's not a loss to discourage or forbid future code-trolling questions and answers by locking all the questions and editing the tag wiki.
3. A code-trolling question is naturally broad as the answers are supposed to be original and creative. This in itself is not the problem with code-trolling. Answering a code-trolling question in an interesting way is a fun programming challenge. Not everyone might like to partake in it, but enough people enjoy it.
4. Don't prescribe to users on what to upvote and what not to upvote. Educate them, yes, but I strongly disagree with every statement like "This shouldn't be upvoted". The very essence of voting is gathering people's unaltered opinions.

Answer 5

TL;DR Change code-trolling to popularity-contest to prevent bad questions.

I really like code-trolling questions. Well, not the questions itselves, but the answers. They are creative, show effort and some are really about puzzling.

The questions are the problem. People write a short problem (which is mostly way too broad) and simply tag it with code-trolling. But people vote them up (don't ask me why).

All of the code-trolling questions are popularity-contests (or should be), so why not simply change them? Then people would have to give specific information about the problem. Simple example:

Write a function which returns the square root of the input. The code should look totally correct to a beginner, but the coding-style has to look horrible for a professional programmer. The program has to look totally correct (at least on the first sight), but it should NOT return the correct square root (difference >0.1).popularity-contest

This sounds much better to me (and is more specific) than

HALP ME how to do square root?!!! code-trollingpopularity-contest

With this solution, we wouldn't disappoint the fans of code-trolling and the bad questions will go away.

I agree with m.buettner that the old, bad code-trolling questions have to disappear/change. After that, kill the whole tag.

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Edit: As pointed out by m.buettner (thanks!) in the comments, a good solution for my idea would be to add something like "If you think you DID come up with an a new/interesting code-trolling type question, consider posting it as a popularity contest (or some other appropriate tag)" to the code-trolling tag wiki.

Answer 6

Based on the number of upvotes on questions and answers, code-trolling is obviously quite popular, just not with everybody.

If you don't want it on the codegolf site, why not put it into a separate StackExchange site for those who enjoy it? You could migrate the favourite posts over there, and keep this site clean.

I also wonder if it needs to stay fixed to coding in particular. Trolling questions on other topics might also be a fun activity for some. (As we can see already on YahooAnswers...)

You may dislike this attitude, but personally I don't care if a question poses a challenging problem or not. What interests me is whether the answers make me laugh. ("Sleepsort" is one of my favourites.)

Answer 7

On the one hand, of all the StackExchange communities, isn't this the best place for code-trolling? A lot of spleen can get vented in a fun way without endangering innocents. If an OP is the perfect scapegoat to gnash your teeth on, why not answer it? If an answer makes you laugh, why not up-vote it?

On the other hand, if the OP is just sad , down-vote it. If OP is tagged as code-trolling and an answer is too literal, down-vote the answer.

On the gripping hand, Help!! How to do square root! undercuts your argument that code-trolling is a problem. The top rated answer is a work of art (literally, but not figuratively). I laughed, I cried, I had a better day afterwards. I'm sure the answerers felt the same way.

Answer 8

There do exist some good code-trolling posts like this answer to a code-trolling question about factorials. To make a good code-trolling post, it must be funny first of all, and it also must nudge people to code interesting solutions to (possibly) basic questions.