Over the years a lot of challenges have accumulated in the sandbox(es) which never made it to being posted on main. Some of these were probably abandoned because they were duplicates or had unfixable problems, but many of them are probably salvageable or were simply forgotten.
People regularly ask how we could increase our question volume, and I believe that there's a lot of good content rotting in the old sandboxes. Is there anyway we could use those old ideas and still bring them to main?
This is now part of the community FAQ.
I suggest that abandoned challenge proposals should be free for others to use as they see fit.
First of all, there are no licence problems with this. All SE posts are licensed under CC BY-SA, which allows modification and redistribution as long as the original source (original author) is attributed. So everything that is holding us back is good manners.
As stated in the question, I think that we're missing out on a lot of good content by ignoring unposted challenges. Hence, by setting up a few rules of courtesy, we should be able to make sue of that content without anyone feeling that their idea has been stolen from them:
I just made up "a month" and "two weeks", and I'm open to suggestions for better time frames.
There's another reason, why I'm strongly recommending this policy. If we're going through with never retiring the sandbox and deleting posted challenges, then there are only two things left that will make the sandbox grow: generally increased activity on PPCG and challenges that were abandoned and hence never deleted. If we could claim those and still post them, that would make the One Sandbox much more feasible.
