This site takes out all of the fun of golfing [closed]

Question

Look at cases like not being able to reopen questions unless you're the poster. Most of the time they would not care, but I DO care for the posts, and it would be nice to reopen the question. After all, this site's fun comes from golfing, and i would help make fun, instead of making the question boring until the heat death of the universe.

Though this site could still be used for standard loopholes, NOT ANYTHING ELSE. At this point you could make a totally different site called Code Golf Standard Loopholes, and it would be better than this.

Please, make us able to do anything, EXCEPT standard loopholes.

Answer 1

If I may summarize your complaint how I see it:

There is often a question which you would like to answer but which is closed as unclear. It's up to the original asker to clarify their challenge, but often times they just don't care and are willing to leave their challenge closed.

This is unfortunate. However there is no challenge dibs. Just because someone posed an unclear version of the challenge does not mean that they own the idea. (They don't even really have control over the text, as to post it they have to license it under a creative commons license) If you think there is a clear version of the challenge and you are willing to put in the effort it would be great if you could ask the challenge yourself.

That's totally encouraged! You are encouraged to ask your own version of a challenge with cleared up specs, even if it's just because you want to post an answer. We'd appreciate it if you were forward about this; saying something like "I saw this old challenge I wanted to answer but it was closed. Here's my version of it so we can all have a go at it."

I am also contractually obligated to mention the sandbox, which can be a good place to work with the community to ensure your challenge is clear before you post it.

Answer 2

About the first part of your question, you have to make enough contributions to the site to have the privilege to vote to reopen a question, which is at 3000 reputation. You can read more about the privileges here.

For the second part of your question, there is nothing wrong with using standard loopholes. As long as they fulfill the question's requirements and does so in a short way, I don't see what's wrong with it.

Answer 3

Although our rules can be pretty annoying at times, they are, ultimately, in service of fun.

It's difficult to pick a set of rules which works well on CGCC, just because there's so many variables. We have 13,000 questions, across dozens of challenge types (and some aren't even challenges at all), with hundreds of languages that vary extremely in how they operate.

This necessitates putting an extra burden on challenge authors and answerers, in order to keep things from becoming chaos. We have a (mostly) reasonable set of standards for answers, including the standard I/O and other things which can be found on the faq page. Questions require much more precise clarity than most newcomers expect, but without that, there's often no way to clarify if an answer is valid except asking OP (e.g., in a "print ASCII art of a unicorn" challenge, there's no objective way to determine if something looks like a unicorn), and that doesn't work if the OP goes inactive in a year.

We didn't always have these rules. They weren't added just because we're all huge fans of bureaucracy and red tape here, but instead because we agreed they'd make the site more fun to golf on. While it does make asking a question harder, that's why we have the sandbox.