We're not a Q&A site. But what should be done about it?

Question

It has come up several times recently (more than usual) that PPCG differs from most of the other Stack Exchange sites in that it's not a Q&A site. People don't come here to ask a question because they have a problem, people come here to solve recreational challenges. The most valuable contribution to this site isn't people using their free time to solve others' problems, but using their free time to think up interesting challenges for the enjoyment of others. This entire post rests on the premise that we are not by any definition a Q&A site. If you want to contest that, please start a separate meta post.

So the actual problem is that the entire site (and more importantly the onboarding experience for new users who don't look past all the standard texts and don't know about PPCG's "special" role in the SE network) is saying "this is a Q&A site, get help here if you have a problem and show what you've tried". I think that's why the "beta" label is more appropriate here than on any other ungraduated site. And given recent developments maybe it's time we actually talked about where those discrepancies are to see if something could be done about them.

Of course, every time someone brings up the "we're not a Q&A site discussion" that is always accompanied with "but SE isn't going to pour any dev hours into custom code for PPCG, so tough luck". And while it's probably true that we won't get large amounts of customisation unless this community becomes a seriously big player, there are some simple things like changing some standard texts that might not be much effort and would already greatly help improve the overall experience here. Plus, SE most definitely isn't going to spend any time on features that were never requested because we thought they wouldn't ever implement them anyway.

So the idea of this post is to discuss how the site could be improved for the way PPCG as a community uses it, and in terms of how we're not a Q&A site. The idea is to do this in the form of potential feature requests. Each answer should be one suggestion for an improvement to the site. These can be discussed in the comments and if they get some support they can get their own feature-request which can then be linked from here. By doing this "staging process" for feature requests relating to the Q&A issue, I hope that this post can act as a hub for them and we can post them in a more organised/coordinated fashion that increases the chances of us getting any of these things at some point in the future.

Note that this isn't about sorting out the gritty details of every single potential feature request like specific phrases and things like that. Those can be discussed when a corresponding feature request is posted later on. This is about suggesting which parts of the site could be improved (and roughly how), as a community brainstorming session, so we can see how they might work together and focus on pushing for the feature requests that seem most promising and urgent.

Please do not repost things that have already been asked about on meta. Existing feature requests related to the Q&A issue include:

• Increase reputation awarded for questions
• Could PPCG benefit from a new sorting mode for answers?
• Could self-answered questions be "unanswered"?
• Should we increase our post character limit to allow substantial stack snippets?
• Let's customise the "How to Answer" pop-up
• Count question score toward tag badges

Answer 1

Can we get a custom Tour page?

The most important part of the onboarding experience for new users (especially those who don't arrive via other sites from the network) is the tour page. Moderators can customise the first paragraph, but in the case of PPCG this is hardly enough, because the rest of the page is strongly misleading:

Ask questions, get answers, no distractions

Get answers to practical, detailed questions

Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.

Ask about...

It would be great if a) those misleading bits could be removed and ideally b) replaced with some important information that applies here instead. The usual process for new users on a Q&A site is that they join the site to ask a question and then start answer others as well when they feel confident about it. Around here, we prefer users to start with solving challenges so they can get a feeling for how challenges work around here before writing their own. (Yes, CH, you are an exception to that...)

Answer 2

Built-in support for scores and leaderboards

The vast majority of PPCG challenges involve minimizing or maximizing the score of a solution, usually the byte count of a program. As it currently stands, users are encouraged to start their answer with a header of the form

## Language, N bytes

These headers have no special meaning to the SE platform, and an often-requested feature is the ability to sort answers by their score. We have developed a leaderboard Stack Snippet that parses these headers and prints a pretty leaderboard, listing the overall ranking and winners by language. This works, but is not optimal, since new users may be unaware of the required header format, and only a fraction of our challenges actually include the snippet (it has to be copy-pasted from the Meta page, and the QUESTION_ID variable needs to be reset after the question is posted). Another workaround is given by a userscript (thanks @ETHProductions for mentioning it), but new users, unregistered visitors and those who can't install browser additions will not benefit from it.

What would be great is some built-in support for attaching scores, language names and/or other metadata to answers (some of which could be disabled for tips questions and unconventional challenges), and the ability to sort and/or filter answers based on the metadata. This would probably take much more effort to implement than most of the other requests here, and the snippet and userscript do provide workarounds, so it's by no means a critical feature.

Answer 3

Remove the "you already have an answer" pop-up

When you post an answer on a question where you have already posted an answer, a pop-up appears asking you if you really want to do this and encouraging you to refine your existing answer. While this makes perfect sense for Q&A sites, it doesn't make any sense for PPCG since answers are generally unique and standalone -- you shouldn't integrate a new solution into an existing one. It's also quite annoying (especially when posting on catalogs).

Answer 4

s/question/challenge/g

This is pretty big and this might actually be a lot of effort on SE's part, but I think the overall impression of this being a Q&A site would be greatly reduced if the site didn't use the word "question" everywhere.

With a few exceptions, all "questions" on PPCG are "challenges". To post a new challenge you need to click on the "ask question" button. There are help centre pages about "how to ask questions". And you can get a list of "unanswered questions".

Changing a single word across the site might seem like a trivial change for so much effort, but I think the effect on the user experience would be quite amazing.

(That said, I realise that the biggest problem isn't even the amount of places that need changing, but that the word "question" is actually tied pretty strongly to the software, e.g. search queries use is:question and inquestion:???, URLs use question or q, etc. This is probably a utopic idea but I wanted to put it out there.)

Answer 5

Fixing the Help Centre

This has the same problems as the tour page. On one hand it's not quite as urgent because it's not as prominent as the tour page, on the other hand the problem exists on a much bigger scale here. I have a 2-3 page list of things that could use changing. Some of them don't apply to PPCG at all and are actively misleading. Others could just use some additional usage guidance specific to PPCG (e.g. that all challenges need a challenge-type tag; that edits should not be used to improve the score of an answer; etc.). I'll include the full list if this is turned into a feature request, but some of the more obvious bits:

• While we can edit the "What topics can I ask about here?" page, the title itself is already misleading.
• The opposite page https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask cannot be edited and its content is completely aimed at Q&A sites (understandably).
• Same with https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask.
• The privileges explain various features in terms of how they are used for the purpose of Q&A.
• https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/help/product-support ummm...

Answer 6

Modify the trigger for low quality posts

Occasionally, very short answers to code-golf competitions written without explanations will end up in the low quality posts queue on the ground that they are too short and are mostly composed of a code block (I just reviewed one, minutes ago). Sure adding an explanation would make a post of higher quality but no explanation does not necessarily means low quality either. Longer answers that are still composed of only a code block without explanations will not trigger this, which put us in an absurd situation where a longer answer to a code-golf competition is considered of higher quality than a shorter one. In the context of a Q&A this trigger makes sense but in the context of a competition linked to the length of the answer it obviously does not.

Answer 7

Remove the Accept feature

This feature is likely way too integral to how SE instances work for this to be possible without forking the software, but I don't think the concept of accepted answers is useful on PPCG.

The most fundamental pillar of this community is that every single question needs an objective winning criterion. That means there's really no reason to give a human the ability to choose a best answer, because the only thing that can really happen is that a) the author chooses the wrong answer or b) at some point the accepted answer will be outdated. The only real benefit is that the best-scoring answer can easily be found, but built-in support for scores would make this obsolete, too. Additionally, the best-scoring answer isn't necessarily the most interesting (e.g. because some language had a built-in for the challenge), so pinning it above longer but cleverer (and higher-voted) answers isn't very beneficial here either.

Additionally, people regularly emphasise to users who are discouraged by golfing languages that they should view challenges as separate competitions within each language. While the green checkmark is only worth 15 rep, it still seems to matter quite a lot to people and is counterproductive to giving the impression that the overall winner doesn't matter as much.

(Side note: a few badges would have to go with that. Scholar, Enlightened, Guru, Populist, Tenacious and Unsung Hero all depend on an answer being accepted.)

Answer 8

Better Close Reasons

This has now become its own separate feature request.

Mods can edit a few slots of custom off-topic reasons. However, the majority of close vote reasons are fixed and cannot be changed by us. While the names of the reasons largely make sense here, their descriptions don't:

• Duplicate: "This question already has an answer here:", "This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question."
• Unclear: "Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question."
• Too broad: "There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs."
• Primarily opinion based: "Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise." (This one in particular I don't think we need at all, because we've got that covered with lack of objective winning criterion.)

The notice boxes and tooltips on questions that are closed have similar problems. We also might want to think about whether there's a custom close reason that doesn't really fit under the "off-topic" banner.

Answer 9

Don't steer new users into posting challenges

The SE interface points first-time users to ask a question. The Ask Question button is bolded and the tour is largely about asking. Answering is more tucked away. This makes sense for Q&A where users go for help. But on PPCG, posting a challenge without having participated rarely goes well.

Our site design should foremost direct users to

• Answer challenges, and give them guidance on how to do so
• Post challenges in the Sandbox for feedback rather than directly on the main site

Answer 10

Tag badges for challenges

Questions (challenges) aren't counted towards tag badges. Seeing how much emphasis we put on the fact that high-quality challenges are the main contribution someone can give to the community, it would be nice to reward people who post a lot of (well-received) challenges about certain topics.

This could be implemented by simply counting challenges towards the normal tag badges, but I think it would be nicer (and more interesting), if there was a second batch of tag badges which only counted challenges. These would probably need different thresholds from the answer badges... 20 challenges in any tag except code-golf is a lot.

Answer 11

Remove "This question has more than 30 answers already" pop up for challenges

It doesn't make sense to restrict the number of solutions to a challenge. In some cases there may be solutions in more than 30 languages, and multiple solutions per language are encouraged.

We have a small proportion of non-challenge questions, but I don't see a problem with them not having this pop up.

Answer 12

Vote button tooltips

Whenever someone asks why their challenge or answer was downvoted (or whether they should up- or downvote some other post), the best response is often "well, what does the tooltip say", since on other SEs it sums up reasons for voting pretty well. They don't really work here though:

• The question upvote says: "This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear." Apart from "clear" these aren't necessarily qualities we're looking for in a challenge. "Interesting" and "well-specified" are a lot more relevant. Correspondingly, the downvote tooltip is: "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful."
• The answer upvote says: "This answer is useful." Not at all what we're looking for. We tend to upvote answers that are interesting, clever, show effort or are educational (but not in the same sense that an answer on a Q&A site is educational - this part is pretty much entirely optional here and usually goes beyond what the challenge actually requires). (And of course, the corresponding downvote tooltip is "This answer is not useful.")
• Accept button: "Click to accept this answer because it solved your problem or was the most helpful in finding your solution." I didn't have a problem to begin with and I didn't need help with finding a solution. Something like "because it solves the challenge and achieved the best overall score" would make a lot more sense.

Answer 13

Increase the "Ask Question" Privilege Threshold to +2

I should note that I'm not convinced that this is a good idea but I figure I'll mention it to see how others feel.

On Q&A sites, the point of posting a question is to get help, to ask a question and get an answer. There shouldn't be a barrier to asking a question. However, in the context of creating and posting challenges, there are many more things to consider.

For this reason, it may be a good idea to require some familiarity with the site in order to post a challenge to the main site. The easiest way to do that would be to require potential challenge authors to have earned at least 2 reputation on this site before being allowed to post questions. This would require one upvote on one answer or one accepted edit. Note that "on this site" implies that an association bonus wouldn't count toward this privilege.

This would also help reduce the number of blatantly off-topic questions we get.

Answer 14

Better Bounty Reasons

This has now become its own separate feature request.

When starting a bounty, people here almost always use either "reward an existing answer" or "draw attention", occasionally "improve details". That's because none of the others make any sense here (and the descriptions of these could also be improved):

• "Authoritative reference needed Looking for an answer drawing from credible and/or official sources." This is simply not a thing here.
• "Canonical answer required The question is widely applicable to a large audience. A detailed canonical answer is required to address all the concerns." For challenges this doesn't make any sense either. It might be useful for the odd question about golfing tips, but that can probably be covered with "improve details".
• "Current answers are outdated The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes." Not a thing here - with our current rules, new languages/features aren't even allowed to be used.
• "Draw attention This question has not received enough attention." Yep, this works. (Although I'd rather read "challenge" in that sentence.)
• "Improve details The current answers do not contain enough detail." The idea of this works in a broad sense, but we're not really looking for "detail" in answers here. Maybe this could be reworked into a bounty reason to improve the score (overall winner, or language-specific solutions).
• "Reward existing answer One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty." This works verbatim. :)

We could also think about whether we could use other bounty reasons here. E.g. bounties are often offered for bonus/side challenges. Maybe we could get a specific bounty reason for that?

As a slightly more elaborate feature request (which will probably go in a separate post eventually), it might be good to have software support for our "bounties without deadlines".

Answer 15

A bounty-like feature for challenges

Sometimes, challenges are so well-designed and/or have taken so much effort, that I want to give the author a bunch of my rep for the great service they've done the community. Currently, the best/only way to reward a challenge is to put a bounty on it to attract more answers (and maybe some more votes because of the additional attention) and to share it off-site e.g. on reddit or Hacker News.

It would be great if the software provided a way to reward our most dedicated challenge authors more directly.

I'm saying "bounty-like" because it probably doesn't make sense to put them up for 7 days and say "this will go to the best challenge which meets criteria X, Y, Z". These would either be indefinite bounties ("first well-defined challenge that pulls off an audio-to-image processing task") or could just be given to any challenge on the spot (maybe also featuring it, like a normal bounty would). Of course, one would have to carefully think about whether and how this system could be gamed.

Answer 16

Modify the placeholder search bar text

If you look at the top right corner of the page, you'll see a search box with the placeholder text "Search Q&A." Even outside of the context of deemphasizing the Q&A terminology on our site, I think this could be better phrased as "Search the site" or similar. So while we're requesting that Q&A-specific text be changed, we might as well request this as well.

Answer 17

Support for indefinite bounties

I don't know if any other site is doing this, but it's quite common here to promise a bounty without actually starting it, because some are asking for additional effort on a challenge that can easily take more than 7 days or are not even known to be possible. In fact we're keeping a list of them on meta and it's fairly long. I don't see this practice going away and it's a nice source of extra(-hard) challenges.

It would be helpful if there was software support for this, so a) we wouldn't have to keep track of it manually (I'm sure there are some additional such offers buried in our challenges that aren't in that list yet) and b) it would give more exposure to this extra challenges, because not everyone is aware of the linked meta post.

Just to clarify, I'm not proposing that bounties on PPCG should generally be without a deadline. This should be a completely separate feature (which wouldn't even necessarily be tied to a single challenge, as some offers on that list show), and the regular 7-day bounties should remain unchanged. I also don't think these should get mixed with the regular bounties in the featured-challenges tab. They could have their slightly less prominent own spot, and should be retractable (e.g. in case someone decides to solve their own challenge). Or maybe - as for normal bounties - the capability of refunding rep should be left to moderators, so people can't game the system easily.

Answer 18

Stop automatically protecting challenges

Right now, a question will be automatically protected if it gets three or more deleted answers. This is a good move for Q&A sites, but the nature of PPCG makes this problematic:

• PPCG tends to get an unusually high number of answers per challenge, making the odds of a few deleted answers much higher.

• Self-deletion because of missing a detail or edge-case in the challenge is very common.

• Lots of amazing answers come from new users.

Additionally, spam is relatively rare and efficiently handled by the community when it comes up, so protecting has less upsides too.

Because of this, right now the community consensus is to always unprotect challenges once they are auto-protected. This is a pain, and it would be nice to not need to do anymore. If a particular question is unusually problematic, it could always be manually protected, but I imagine this would be rare.

To quote Dennis,

I've had to unprotect Is this number a prime? three times so far. If I hadn't done it, the creator of this answer (new user, hasn't written another post before or after that one) wouldn't have been able to post his stellar Hexagony primality tester which earned 90 upvotes and a juicy +500 bounty. Yes, this is a rare gem, but it surely was worth the 22 answers that had to be dealt with without protection.

Answer 19

Collaborative posts with equal rep sharing

Occasionally 2 or more people will work together on writing a challenge or a solution. Currently all the reputation goes to the person whose name it is in. I'd love to see the ability for the post owner to add 1 or more additional owners so that all rep for the post is split equally among them.

Anyone else would still be able to edit as normal, without a rep reward.

I've seen both challenges and solutions that were a group effort, and I'd like to see more of both.

Answer 20

Rephrase "Share your knowledge, Q&A style"

When you post a question on any site in the Stack Exchange network, you're given the option to immediately add an answer to "share your knowledge, Q&A style." That's nice. However, as is the point of this entire post, we're not a Q&A site, and thus this text makes no sense in the context of our site. When you think about it, posting a submission to a challenge is kind of like sharing knowledge, so if you answer your own challenge then you are in some sense sharing your knowledge. But in the context of our site, that phrase still sounds kind of awkwardly out of place.

Answer 21

Feb 2017 - status-completed See this feature request.

This little blurb from Downgoat's PPCG Design Userscript:

Before you post, take some time to read through the forbidden loopholes if you haven't done so already.

That appears right above the Post your answer button when the script is enabled. Here's what it looks like as I type this:

I think a little recommendation (for main only, of course) to read this site's README.md is a good idea.

Answer 22

A way to refine questions before we can answer them

The sandbox feels rather hacky. On all other sites, questions are refined until they make sense but here, we have a problem when existing answers are already posted. A question should be able to go from a draft state to a final state. I don't have a particular idea on how to implement it, but the simplest for me would be to close (manually or automatically) the question as soon as it is asked ("waiting for approval and feedback"). Questions would have more visibility. When we are ready to answer, we reopen it.

Related: PPCG Sandbox Viewer

Answer 23

Allow answers to be tagged, just like questions are

Unlike most sites, where questions are fairly specific, questions on PPCG are highly general; when we ask a question, we're really asking a range of related questions ("write a short Jelly program to do X", "write a short Python program to do X", etc.). As such, we get a range of different answers, and many of those answers need to be treated differently.

It makes sense that we could have a tag badge for answering questions in, say, Perl or Brachylog. The problem is, the site is looking for a tag on the question (because the answers don't have tags), and the question obviously won't have a tag specifying the language the answers are in. Allowing tags on answers to count towards the tag badge, in addition to tags on the corresponding question, would make sense. (On a side note, the code-golf tag isn't functioning anything like SE likely intended, because the tag is on almost every question; I'm not convinced that this is a problem, but it's likely at least worth being aware of.)

There are other tags, separate from language tags, that I can potentially see on answers. (For example, Anarchy Golf, another golfing site, makes heavy use of a "cheat" tag which is used to identify answers which meet the letter of the specification but not the spirit; cheating at golf is something of a genre of its own. Over here we let the genuine answers stand, and argue over whether the cheating answers count, but always count them as part of the same competition; answer tags might help solve this problem). Likewise, a tag could indicate the sort of algorithm that was used (e.g. recursion, or brute-force). These are all tools that are useful when searching for answers with particular topics, and for seeing what kind of answers people normally give.

This would also help with automatic syntax highlighting (at present, syntax highlighting is something that has to be added manually in a fairly tedious way, because we don't have language tags to suggest highlighting rules like other languages do).

Answer 24

Allow the sandbox to be permanently featured

Most sites don't have or need a sandbox. Since we have "challenges" instead of "questions" it is very important to have a sandbox and to make sure that it is easily seen by new users, so that our challenge-quality can stay high. So, we have the sandbox featured.

However on other sites, it doesn't make sense to have a single meta post permanently featured, and so it is automatically un-featured every month. On one hand, mods can re-feature it every month, but this certainly isn't the best solution. There is right now a history of almost 200 edits on the sandbox. It would be nice if we could just have it always featured instead.

Answer 25

Remove the "more than 30 answers" pop-up, but only on the Sandbox.

When you post an answer on a question that has more than 30 answers, you get a pop-up asking you if you're sure you want to do this. This is fine for most questions but it doesn't make much sense in the context of the Sandbox, and I fear could scare new users away from posting their challenges in the Sandbox.

Answer 26

System to Suggest Improvements (golfing help)

An important part of this site is suggesting ways to shorten existing answers. However, there isn't a good way to do this. Comments are generally the accepted method, but that poses a few problems:

• New users can't make suggestions as they are unable to comment. This can (and has) cause(d) them to instead post a trivial variation of another answer because they can't suggest the change.
• If the author does accept your improvements, you do not receive any reputation for your hard work; the best you can get is a shout-out such as "EDIT: thanks to <username> for saving x bytes!" added to the post. This could again lead people to post their own answer
• it is hard to describe some changes with a comment; often it requires pasting in the old section of code and the new code, taking up more of our valuable time and precious space on our screens.

The other option would be to suggest an edit, but that seems to have been rejected by meta (with good reason).

I would personally love a "suggest improvement/golf" feature, as it makes up the majority of my activity on this site.

This feature would require the author to accept it; otherwise things could get messy.

Answer 27

Start all questions (challenges) as initially on hold

(This is a specific proposal for implementing this general idea.)

In general, questions get a lot more attention when they're posted on main than when (and if) they're posted on Meta. This includes both answers, and improvements to the question itself. If we're lucky, the question gets fixed in the sense of being made better via edits, rather than being fixed in the sense of being unchangeable by answers which rely on loopholes in it (which normally makes the question unsalveagable even if it could have been good).

Because a question is more of a community collaboration here than it is on other SE sites (I know a very common pattern is post question → close → edit and reopen), it would make sense to have time to perfect the question before answers are allowed.

This would ideally be implemented in the SE software, but it's possible to do an inferior version without changes: you could get a bot with diamond moderator rights (or even a ton of bots which merely had the reputation to close posts) to close every question/challenge as soon as it was posted (probably unless it has tips as a tag), placing it on hold for a few days (after which it will naturally lapse to closed). The main awkwardness in this would be what close reason you'd use ("too broad" is probably closest but doesn't really fit).

This would create a lot of extra work for the reopen queue, but that's unlikely to be a problem given our current balance between users and reputations.

Answer 28

s/answer/???/g

Complimentary to Martin Buettner's s/question/challenge/g request, the word answer is quite universal and integral to each SE site... except us, for all the same reasons noted in Martin's proposal.

To the end of consistency and sanity, this should probably change alongside, to... ? Well, I'm not sure what, but surely "Solution", "Response," etc are better alternatives.

Answer 29

Explicitly allow questions requesting help / advice in golfing code

Golf is not on topic at Code Review. We should make it clearer that questions requesting help for golfing substantial / non-trivial code (for varying definitions of trivial) are on-topic, because it's been voted on.

Answer 30

Adding a "bytes" sorting order to the solution section of each code-golf challenge

The built-in leaderboard function might be too "clumsy" for the people at SE HQ to implement. This might be a cleaner way of fixing the same problem.