Code-troll rules [duplicate]

Question

This is a discussion about the rules. Actual rules can be found in https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/tags/code-trolling/info

The first ever question with code-trolling tag (I need a program where the user inputs an array of doubles and the program outputs the array sorted) has been a success and it seems reasonable to assume we will see more of these. It might be a bit early, but I hope to open a discussion on what the rules should be. Original rules:

Suppose that some lazy guy in StackOverflow or elsewhere, asks a homework give-me-dah-codez question. Your task is to give a code that works, but is still useless, severely frustrating the OP.

This could be achieved by:

• Deliberately misinterpreting the question and giving a code that clearly answers what the OP asked, but does something different than what he intended.
• Giving a code that runs in superexponential time or worse, when the trivial solution would be linear or better.
• Introducing something extremely unacceptable or unreasonable in the code that cannot be removed without throwing everything away, rendering the answer utter useless for the OP.
• Writing a code that is a direct and plain cheat on the question. Being a creative troll.
• Being evil.

In your answer, you should briefly explain what you are doing to troll the OP.

Further, we have one restriction: The chosen language should not be the sole reason to troll the lazy OP. Otherwise, you could just plainly encode the correct solution using brainfuck, golfscript or some language that is clearly a crazy, unexpected or unusual choice for the problem, but this would ruin the intention of this as everybody would do that. The intention is to write the homework in a language that the lazy OP might think acceptable, but still frustrate him.

To start the discussion I propose the following change:

• Not being evil. I understand evil as in rm -rf /.
• A nice way to limit the print "the sorted array" answers.

Answer 1

• Not being evil. I understand evil as in rm -rf /.

As I already started to say in comments and are instead making an answer from that, I think we could just add a restriction to make it not destructive.

I like the "Being evil" because it is a really strong suggestion and the vagueness was intended to incentive answerers in being creative. This basically means that you should by no means being helpful. You may be evil by just plain lying, by looping infinitely, by making the OP (and hopefully his teacher too) to lose a lot of time in a useless answer that will give a plain F as the score. And so on.

We could add something like:

The program is in general expected to be amusing, annoying, silly, deceptive and/or mischievous, but is must not be destructive.

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• A nice way to limit the print "the sorted array" answers.

I agree about the answers that just plainly do this. But there are some answers that do this in a creative way. I think that adding something like

Please do better than just printing a quote from the lazy OP question. If the lazy OP asks "I need a program to output FOO", a program that is simply output FOO is not very creative. Do better than that.

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Further, I would add this:

Answers that provides no code are not elligible for being accepted. They might be fun and could get some upvotes, but won't be accepted.

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Finally, initially I was in fear that the question would be ignored, could get a lot of downvotes and be closed, so I am very happy that what happened was quite the opposite and i was very wrong about that presumption.

It is much more successful than I could though. In just a few hours I got 11 badges, 7 hats, including one secret hat, hitted the daily reputation cap limit in a flash, spent all my daily upvotes in answers to my own question, got more than 50 answers, more than 70 upvotes and almost 20 stars in the question, and almost 50 upvotes in my own answer. And this is still counting. I never saw a question collecting so many answers and upvotes so quickly, and I am proud to say that I asked it! People, really thanks to everyone that is participating to this.

The only thing left, is that I really want that someone beats my own answer, I would be very happy to accept an answer that could do this.

Answer 2

I agree with the comments that "being evil" is too vague. A "bad" evil is harming the computer, while a "good" evil is having code that sometimes doesn't work. We should clarify that "being evil" should be in a similar spirit to the Underhanded C competitions.

I also feel that the print "the sorted array"-type answers do get old after a while. It's kinda funny at first, but repeating the joke doesn't take much effort. It might be hard to limit those answers, so I think it may be best to leave it up to the voters.

I might add something else to the list of ways to troll, which is to write something which no person would dare hand in to a teacher, like obfuscated code. The code works flawlessly, but how it works is so obscure that there's no way to understand it without being the author. For an example, look at my submission to the sorting question. I understand how it works, but explaining it is impossible.

We could probably extend that to mean solving the problem in a way that the (non-existent) "asker" will almost surely not understand, like some super-obscure feature of the language. This would not be as obfuscated code as it would be obscure code.

After all, trolling is a art.

Answer 3

In this post, I'm writing as a user, not a moderator.

This is awesome. :-) It reminds me of how I approach a lot of the homework problems people post in the [scheme] tag (since a number of CS courses use Scheme).

Basically, professional Schemers frequently use higher-order functions (rather than manual recursion), SRFIs, third-party libraries, "insider-Scheme", etc., which students are generally disallowed from using in homework answers. So I simply answer with the code I'd write, as a seasoned Schemer. Easy! :-P

Answer 4

I'd suggest to avoid "trolling with complexity": you can add random layers of complexity to any kind of program, you can add as many as you want, and it is farily easy and totally uninteresting to do so.

For me, the real spirit of code trolling, is to be able to write a simple, elegant program, which does what the OP asked, but is still useless.

Look at the adding function question, for instance. Most of the answers are entangled blurbs of stuff, anyone will notice at first sight he's being trolled and they make no sense.

However, two answers shine brightly among all this dirt: the sleepadd, and the recursive: they are both useless to the OP, but they are simple and elegant, so that at first sight you might think they make sense, they might be the correct answer. If you read them, you understand them. That's the point. You read, you understand, but it's still useless. It works, you know why it works, but it's still wrong.

As opposite to "you try read them, you have no clue what's happening". I hope the difference is quite clear.

To me, adding complexity, is exactly like just using languages like brainfuck or golfscript, really no difference at all: you still do not understand, it still works. Same thing. Boring.

Answer 5

(I'm adding this as a separate answer because it covers a different aspect.)

I think it is interesting how some questions on this site "go viral." Once they make it onto the hot feed, they attract a lot of attention from people who didn't yet know this site existed. There are 30 questions on the front page of the hot list. Of them, 9 are from beta sites, and we have 2 of those 9.

I hope that we are getting closer to exiting beta, although we still have a ways to go. I honestly don't know what the requirements are, however. Patents.SE is fully published, but only has 881 questions (we have 1,287). CodeReview.SE has 10,945 questions and is still in beta. Bicycles.SE is fully published and has 3,953 questions.

Answer 6

A nice way to limit the print "the sorted array" answers.

One way to do this is to require the trolling to actually happen algorithmically, within the code itself. If the "misinterpretation" of the requirements is just a matter of wordplay, then the code itself is meaningless.

Answer 7

Ok, but how are we going to get all the give-me-the-codez-for-my-homework questions migrated here? ;-)

Migration functionality on stackoverflow is unfortunately limited to the top-5 sites or so. Other than that, only moderators apparently can migrate questions.

Answer 8

(I am a newcomer here, i find it thanks to the first trolling question so I might not have very strong background here)

Anyway, the first question was funny because it was very original. But now it seems that with all those mindless coding changes they are not funny anymore.

The problem with them is that they are supposed to be joke but at the same time the are so explicitly telling you that they are only jokes. That it is very artificial and not funny.

I mean the purpose of Trolling is to make fun of somebody who has no idea that it is only trolling. This is not a trolling, you would have to be really trolling the person who asks and here everybody knows that both the question and the answer are not real. It does not make sense.

The purpose of the Stack Exchange is to help them find the answer to their questions. As those questions are not really questions and the answers are not really helpful.

As it is not trolling nor funny and most importantly not helpful I would go for banning the trolling questions.

(I would like to say that i liked the idea of the first question.)