Questions tagged [challenge-quality]
For questions that relate to the quality of challenges on the main site
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Things to avoid when writing challenges
If there is something that you find annoying / counterproductive / unfair / detrimental / no longer funny in challenges (question posts), describe it in an answer here, and propose a recommended ...
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Things to consider when creating a challenge
There's a lot to remember to include when writing a challenge for this site. What are some things that are easy to forget?
Return to FAQ index
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The state of the popularity contest tag
Recently, there's been a strong push against popularity-contest challenges. This post sums up the general feelings of the community pretty well, in my opinion. Even when challenge authors do ...
user45941
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Announcing the CodeGolf.SE First Periodic Premier Programming Puzzle Push
This Programming Push has ended ::sigh:: But we may do another in a few weeks or months, and your high quality contributions are always welcome.
Whereas
The site has suffered from low traffic for ...
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Easy challenges and Hot Network Questions
I've noticed many challenges getting to the top of Hot Network Questions because they are really easy and get many answers that feed the activity-rewarding hotness formula. In turn, the visibility ...
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Should we disallow non-observable requirements?
One of the more recent things to avoid that's coming up a lot is the use of non-observable requirements. The most common incarnations of this are things like "no hardcoding", "implement this algorithm"...
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The state of the underhanded tag
I recently looked at the underhanded tag and noticed that all 3 of the newest questions are closed as "Too Broad". From our new rules for popularity contests and the code-trolling tag being off-topic ...
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A Better Help Center
This question is somewhat in response to The one limiting stat for us still being in beta where the consensus seemed to be that question quality was the main issue. I definitely agree.
I believe that ...
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What is a spec?
Our FAQ on "on-topic questions" currently states:
All questions on this site, whether a programming puzzle or a code golf, should have ...
A clear specification of what constitutes a ...
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The broken window of "Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code"
Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code is our highest-voted question. It regularly inspires newcomers to pose similar challenges, which get heavily downvoted with the poster ...
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Tips for King of the Hill challenges
Inspired by this question, what are some tips you guys have for creating king of the hill challenges? What are some things to keep in mind in the planning and implementing of the rules and the ...
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Help us come up with rules who should be rewarded with an iPad2 for making the site great
dmckee has recently started the "1P5" to improve the quality of posts, the quantity of (good!) posts, and the motivation of users on this site.
We (Stack Exchange Inc.) think that this is a really ...
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How should challenge authors be rewarded for creating exemplary challenges?
Over on Puzzling.SE, the community there has been discussing various ways to reward puzzle authors for creating exemplary puzzles. Given that we're like Puzzling.SE in that we're not a Q&A site, ...
user45941
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How can we get new users to use the sandbox properly?
The problem
Often, when we get new users, this happens:
they post their first few challenges, which receive negative feedback
they are instructed to use the sandbox, which they do
not long after (...
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Should answers have to handle invalid inputs?
I'm trying to get advice on how to make my challenges better. One rule that I feel like I'm always specifying is what to do when an invalid input is given. There's really two main paradigms to take ...
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Announcing the CodeGolf.SE Second Periodic Premier Programming Puzzle Push
Whereas
The site has suffered from low traffic for weeks
We've been in beta for 271 days and our numbers are marginal
Too many recent question have been both too easy and poorly specified
Users have ...
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Should homework be allowed?
Recently, browsing questions of PPCG, i have found a lot of questions that are simply for the purpose of offloading their homework assignments, due to lasiness or easiness of this platform. For this ...
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A Weekly Challenge Competition
I mentioned this in chat a bit ago, and got somewhat varied feedback. I thought I'd go ahead and ask a meta question to gauge the community's overall thoughts. As a few people have noted, our ...
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For compression-related challenges, should we take steps to level the use of 7-bit and 8-bit character sets? [duplicate]
(Closely related in the original premise, but both the question and its answers go off in a different direction: this meta post.)
Something I've noted in many challenges which are fundamentally about ...
user62131