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The Sandbox for Proposed Challenges is a great way for people to get feedback on challenges and make sure they are not duplicates, are clear, and are ready for posting before they post it to the main site.

However, with over eight thousand answers (over three thousand undeleted answers), a lot of which are posted, discarded, owned by inactive users, or otherwise no longer relevant, it can become difficult to navigate (especially for people on mobile).

We previously retired and remade the Sandbox periodically, but we stopped doing that to keep it all in one easily accessible place.

There is a problem with trying to move the sandbox which is that a lot of things are dependent on it being question 2140, including our site's info box, the sidebar when asking a question, several bots, etc, and moving the sandbox can cause a lot of unintended damage.

Thus, here is the discussion: what should we do about the Sandbox?

Please provide your opinions below. I am intentionally not offering any solutions or direction, as I want to see what the community has in mind. "Do absolutely nothing" is also an option - keep in mind that we've had this current model for years and our site hasn't burned to the ground, so it's possible no solutions solve more problems than they create.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm not really seeing a precise problem in this post. You say it can be hard to navigate, but don't elaborate. The only real problem I am aware of with the sandbox having many abandoned posts is that it is difficult to search for duplicates. There was also a problem with the (apple?) app that didn't paginate, but that should be fixed by correcting the bug not changing the site. I feel this lack of focus lead to the current somewhat non-answer which is mostly about creating tools to make the sandbox easier to use and relying on mods/high rep users to moderate the sandbox. \$\endgroup\$
    – FryAmTheEggman
    Commented Jun 12, 2021 at 3:17
  • \$\begingroup\$ Just to be clear, I'm not saying either post is bad, just that I don't think they are very useful in their current state. \$\endgroup\$
    – FryAmTheEggman
    Commented Jun 12, 2021 at 3:18
  • \$\begingroup\$ @FryAmTheEggman That's fair. Thank you for the criticism/feedback; I appreciate it. I'll try to narrow the scope a bit - perhaps I should've left it to someone who raised the issue in the first place; I find the Sandbox mildly annoying but since I only review by directly clicking links when people ask for feedback, it doesn't really bother me, as long as I don't try to use mobile. I think the "client-side" usage of the Sandbox would be more appropriate to focus on improving and I'll see if I can think of something more specific. \$\endgroup\$
    – hyperneutrino Mod
    Commented Jun 12, 2021 at 3:25

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Full clean-up and improved reviewing tools

This would be a two-part plan to make the sandbox a better experience both for new users, and longtime reviewers.

Clean-up

This is something that's been discussed quite often. There are various ways to go about it, but the goals would be (at minimum):

  1. Adopt quality abandoned proposals
  2. Delete posted or low quality proposals

If this is going to be done, more waiting just means more posts pile up.

Reviewing tools

For reviewing, the sandbox's layout is not optimal. For people who spend a good amount of time helping out, additional unofficial tools may be helpful.

This would include things like keeping the sandbox viewer userscript up-to-date, and getting the guild of reviewers bots working.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I support this in theory, but the implementation is lacking. This reads a lot like a list of what we wish we could have, rather than a concrete approach that could lead to a proper solution to this problem \$\endgroup\$
    – caird coinheringaahin g Mod
    Commented Jun 11, 2021 at 21:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ @cairdcoinheringaahing I didn't specify any concrete details of the implementation because I don't really have them. The first one has been discussed at quite a bit of length, and it seems like the actual implementation is something that would probably be more useful to discuss once a specific date and time range for this to happen could be established. \$\endgroup\$
    – rydwolf
    Commented Jun 12, 2021 at 1:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ +1 for mentioning deleting posted answers. What was the reason behind having a link to the posted question in the sandbox in the first place? \$\endgroup\$
    – mindoverflow
    Commented Aug 25, 2021 at 8:39

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