Questions tagged [policy]
This tag indicates that your question is about site policies. Usually, new proposals for policies or questions about existing ones will have this tag
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Definitive policy about answers not meeting the challenge specification
This question has been asked so often, I have no idea what our actual policy is:
Almost-correct answers
Should answers that break the rules be deleted?
Should we flag and delete Not an Answer posts?
...
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Loopholes that are forbidden by default
There are a number of standard loopholes which experienced question-setters seek to explicitly close. However, inexperienced question-setters may unintentionally leave them open, or respondents may ...
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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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Default for Code Golf: Input/Output methods
It looks like we have a consensus that we want certain defaults for the format which answers are expected in for code-golf. On that poll, the question arose twice, which input/output formats should be ...
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Correct flag usage on invalid submissions
Recently, a couple of invalid answers have been flagged as NAA. This is somewhat of a duplicate of this answer on our policy, but I want to mention this because it's important that everyone is using ...
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Interpretation of Truthy/Falsey
Quite a few code-golf questions require output to be "truthy or falsey". This is possibly confusing as these terms can possibly mean different things to different people, and especially in different ...
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Should submissions be allowed to exit with an error?
Suppose we have the following Python code:
f=lambda x:x*2
X
The first line defines a function which doubles a number. Then the second line is reached, is found ...
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Default for Code Golf: Program, Function or Snippet?
One of the things many (new?) users forget to specify in code-golf challenges is whether the answers should provide a full program or a function (or even just a snippet). For most such things, we have ...
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Is it OK to promote my own posts in chat?
Occasionally I see other users posting links to their own answers or challenges in The Nineteenth Byte. Is this OK? Can I promote my own posts as well?
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Let's decide what kind of non-challenge questions we want once and for all
4 reopen votes and 1 delete vote is a strange thing to see. It's also slightly worrying that we have so little consensus on this matter. So let's bring the community together.
What kind of non-...
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Standard definitions of terms within specifications
Quite often I find that I am repeating myself when creating a challenge. For example, usually I have to retype the definition of "random" in all of my posts, or I have to specify the same thing about ...
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What details should always be given for a code golf task?
Related: For Code Golf, how do you deal with languages without a traditional print/echo statements?
Related: What programming language should we consider for the code-golf solution ?
Related: Use of ...
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What do we do with an abandoned challenge that requires the author's participation?
When the author of a challenge makes a commitment to a challenge posted (e.g. "The timing will be done on my machine") but then clearly gives up on the challenge (e.g. by attempting to ...
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Should AI generated questions and or answers be banned?
Relevant discussion that inspired this question
Questions and answers (content) generated by AIs like LLMs (e.g ChatGPT, Google Bard, character.ai) are not prohibited on the StackExchange network by ...
Wheat WizardMod
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Do we want a banner warning about our policy on AI generated content?
Since January 10th, sites have been able to request to opt in to have a banner shown on answers reminding answerers on their site's policy regarding AI generated content.
This leads to two questions:
...
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Is a transliteration tool enough to grant count as SBCS?
Prompted by this. I'll speak about Dyalog APL here, but this could really apply to any language.
Background
Dyalog APL has its own SBCS called ⎕AV. For backwards ...
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Definite policy about duplicate answers
Every now and then, we get an answer flag the declares an answer a duplicate of another. So far, I haven't really acted on them – except for leaving a comment if the flagger hadn't done so already – ...
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What character encodings may a submission use?
In code-golf questions, we typically score submissions by their byte count. However, whenever a submission uses a character outside of the ASCII range, the question of which encoding the code uses ...
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What are our policies about this exotic I/O format about integers?
Please refer to this post on Sandbox. (EDIT: The challenge is posted on main.)
Basically, the proposed challenge is about a new numeral system I made. Though the proposal doesn't require the I/O ...
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What does "taking no input" mean for a program?
Fixed output challenges usually state that the program "must take no input". I usually interpret this as "The standard input is empty", but after thinking about this, there are actually several valid ...
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Command-line flags on front ends
Our standard policy regarding command-line flags states that one should count the space before the dash (-) too, when there aren't any "free" options, since it ...
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We need to take an official stance on code trolling
Here's our to-do list for the project:
Close all existing code-trolling questions (or maybe re-tag those three I mentioned).
status-declined - if locked or deleted, closing might not matter, so we ...
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Default policy for output in decision problems
Challenges tagged as decision-problem involve "deciding whether the input meets certain criteria". Although some challenges with this tag involve more than two categories, most involve only ...
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What assumptions can be made about the environment in Scratch?
It seems to be undisputed precedent for Scratch answers that only the code is counted when determining the bytes used for an answer (although, how to come up with the amount of bytes that the code ...
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Are baseline submissions serious contenders?
One of PPCG's oldest rules, mentioned in What topics can I ask about here?, is that all answers to challenge questions must:
Be a serious contender for the winning criteria in use. For example, an ...
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Should obfuscated JavaScript be allowed?
I had posted an "obfuscated rickroll in Greasemonkey" challenge, which I have deleted in response to Mike Bethany's comment that answers to the question would be of primary use to "spammers." In ...
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Should we refresh our standard loopholes?
We have a list of standard loopholes which are forbidden by default.
This is pretty good, it does good for the site. But it's also 8 years old, and it is showing its age.
We occasionally inaugurate ...
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Can Function Objects be Appened to STDIN From the Stack?
This is mostly specific to Vyxal, but I've worded the language so that any hypothetical stack language could utilise this
Say you have a stack-based language which supports function objects on the ...
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What is our consensus on languages which do not halt by design?
Current consensus seems to be that programs must terminate by default. This makes sense in general. However, does this bar use of languages which are not designed with a halt state (other than ...
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Minecraft Commands I/O Methods
What I/O should be allowed for Minecraft commands answers? There is already this post, but it is mainly focused on redstone creations, and is quite outdated.
Here are some specific points, however, a ...
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Does using SMBF count as a cheating quine?
There has been some debate about whether or not using Self-Modifying Brainfuck counts as a "cheating quine":
Write a Metaquine
Golf you a quine for great good!
About SMBF:
The program's source ...
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Policy on answering challenges with cumbersome I/O
We've probably all seen new users ask questions with cumbersome I/O rules, like mandatory taking the input by reading separated lines of STDIN and outputting to STDOUT to give an example.
In those ...
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Let's allow newer languages/versions for older challenges
I've been thinking for a long time that our non-competing policy for newer languages (or language versions) is harmful. Just for context, we currently require all answers which require implementations ...
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Input/Output format, scoring, and the status of The Powder Toy
The Powder Toy is a falling-sand game with enough functionality to be classified as a interesting take on fungeoids.
However, there are a few problems with this.
Input/Output
Programs (simulations) ...
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What loopholes should be assumed when a name-specific file is used for code golf?
I have posted this golfing tip for Bash before:
In Pure Bash (or any other pure shellscript), use . for looping.
It's a tip that recomments using a file whose the ...
CommunityBot
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Clarifying "serious contender" in the help center
The help center says:
All solutions to challenges should:
Correctly implement the required specification.
Be a serious contender for the winning criteria in use. For example, an entry to ...
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PPCG equivalent to http://stackoverflow.com/jobs
Dyalog's APL team is looking to hire, and we are more interested in golfers than regular programmers, as the former are more likely to have the right mindset.
Since codegolf.stackexchange.com/jobs ...
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Should "import" statement be included in byte count if I'm not using it directly [duplicate]
Related: On scoring imported functions
I knew that if I want to use some imported functions, I had to include "import" statement in the byte count. For example, I want to find out the most ...
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How should Community Wikis be used?
Community Wikis (CWs) seem to be an often misunderstood feature on Stack Exchange in general. For instance, I'm often seeing them used to avoid gaining reputation when the author feels they don't ...
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Should we repost a challenge because of a changed consensus?
Golf you a quine for great good! is a great example, since it was posted before the quine consensus was made. That means it's cluttered with answers not following it. Should we repost challenges ...
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Does a Vim submission have to end in a certain mode?
This question came up recently in a discussion of the validity of my answer to this question. It was argued that the answer was a V submission, not a Vim submission.
It is widely agreed that ...
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Handling old, popular, creative, but non-competitive answers
Take a look at this answer: Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code.
This is the most upvoted answer on our site right now. However, as many have pointed out, by modern ...
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How do we deal with novel emerging/recurring challenge types?
Recently, there has been a new type of challenge introduced called duct-tape-coding. Fears have been brought up that, like code-trolling, this challenge type may spawn posts that are extremely trivial ...
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In bash, can I use non-coreutil programs
Since bash scripts (or any other Linux shell scripts) are accepted as a programming language, I wonder what (Linux) programs are accepted as callable from the command line.
It seems that it is ...
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What is our consensus on floating point issues?
As far as I can tell, we don't yet have a definitive Meta consensus to the following question:
Are answers allowed to work "in theory" but fail in practice due to floating point issues?
...
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Byte counting policy for library imports in Factor
As this month's LotM (Forth) was not gaining much participation, I guessed it's partly because it's way too low-level, so I was looking into Factor as a modern, high-level alternative to Forth. If it ...
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Omitting trailing closing parentheses in Excel
When golfing in Excel, it is often possible to omit closing parentheses at the end of an expression. Excel will detect this, add the missing closing parentheses and ask if this is what was meant.
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For fastest-code questions are new compiler optimisations as non-competing allowed?
I looked around and it seems that the language is defined by the compiler not operational semantics. In normal code golf new languages are banned because of the loophole of implementing the answer as ...
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When should rule changes count?
Related: When is it allowable to change the rules?
As noted in the linked meta post above, it's typically particularly frowned upon to significantly change the rules of a challenge after posting it. ...
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What are programming languages? [duplicate]
Often, answers to questions asking for "programs" or talking about "programming languages" utilize things like sed, awk, … in ...
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