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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Closing old question as duplicate of a new one
What is our policy regarding closing an old challenge as a duplicate of a new one?
I know this happens on other sites (at least SO), if the newer question is generally better or usually if it gathers ...
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What should our policy on insults, vulgarity, profanity, and other possibly offensive material be?
A very popular challenge was recently deleted due to attracting material that could possibly be considered hate speech or offensive to some people.
We probably need an official policy on how much ...
- 71.4k
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Winning conditions not measurable until question author decides to reveal test data set
This question has an interesting property, in that judging a winner is dependent on unknown data:
Recognize handwritten digits
This is actually not an uncommon way of things working in puzzle-space. ...
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Posting a challenge framework?
I'm a big fan of king-of-the-hill, and I'd like to see more of them. One of the problems is that they take a bit of work to set up and run. More than your average code-golf question, for instance.
...
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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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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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1 on 1 language mappings "legal"?
Basically, what the title says. Is creating a new language specifically for Golfing, with some predefined names and imported methods (I'm talking about my PYG language, but there are possibly others ...
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Is presenting a challenge with the intent of using the best answer in an open-source project okay?
First and foremost: I understand that all answers posted on Stack Exchange sites are required to be licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and that attribution is required. This is less of a licensing question ...
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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 should you do in cases where you've got answers, but others think that the question is not a challenge?
See, for example, a question I asked earlier: Write the shortest code to generate a random number between 1 and x.
@Oberon said "I'm not a downvoter, but maybe it's because the question isn't much of ...
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How much support does something need to be policy?
Of fortunately, there is no metametacodegolf, so I will just put my question here. At https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/22646/16842, someone said my question violated a post here, but the post had ...
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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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Untestable languages
What is the general feeling about answer that can't be tested because no compiler or interpreter is available?
The accepted answer to this question is a case in point. The question has been raised in ...
- 11.3k
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Challenge closed as duplicate that's clearly different
I posted Draw the Olympic Games logo, which is clearly a code-golf question requiring users to post a solution that outputs ascii-art.
chubakueno posted Olympic Games Logo - Free Style Edition, which ...
- 1,103
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Strike-through previous character counts
I often notice posts which contain strike-through versions of previous character counts, like this:
Perl (123 111 chars)
I don't see this practice mentioned anywhere in the FAQs, nor here on meta. ...
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I can't understand why my quesiton was closed
I can't understand why my question was closed:
Rotate An Integer Array with an O(n) algorithm
It was previously put "on hold", then I edited my question to meet the requirements.
But then it was ...
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What should count as "not an answer" here? [duplicate]
Lately, I've seen a bunch of poor answers flagged as "not an answer" (NAA) in the flag review list.
Such flags seem to be controversial, even among reviewers. For example, at the moment:
this ...
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Can we enforce a time limit?
By time limit, I mean the OP should include one, such that (s)he will sooner or later accept the winning answer, provided there is at least one valid answer.
It doesn't have to be a fixed time. ...
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FAQ update ideas
I'm trying to solicit ideas on a couple of items where I think a FAQ update is appropriate:
Amend FAQ to state that language-agnostic is the default
Is using external decompression legitimate golfing
...
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Amend FAQ to state that language-agnostic is the default
In the meta question Is [language-agnostic] an appropriate tag the top-voted answer is in favour of eliminating the language-agnostic tag provided that we make it clear that our intent is that all ...
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Is using external decompression legitimate golfing?
The 12 Days of Christmas Lyrics challenge has several solutions of the form "Use an external decompression utility on this file to create a solution.language file, then execute the decompressed file." ...
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Are questions about designing code contests on-topic here?
I'm a moderator on Programmers, and we just received a question asking for advice and feedback about a code contest the poster is designing:
Would This Work As A New Obfuscated C Code Contest?
...
user86
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Brainfuck challenges?
EDIT: Clarified my point after seeing dmckee's answer.
I just discovered brainfuck and find it really amusing. It seems to me that it is a perfect material for programming puzzles (especially code-...
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Should question proposers be expected to have a coded answer before they propose?
All too often I look at questions proposed here and I think: "The proposer clearly doesn't have a running solution to this question."
Should we make it an expectation that before posting a question, ...
- 4,989
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New contest type proposal.
I'd like to suggest that to date we have missed a class (or maybe two) of programming puzzles.
ai-player would indicate a game played against a defined (but initially unknown) input or against a ...
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Are "restricted programming" problems on topic?
I'm not sure if "restricted programming" is the right term for what I'm thinking about. I'm referring to questions of the form: "Complete [some task] in [some specific language] without [some obvious ...
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Are "one line" problems distinct from code golf, and if so what rules apply?
How to write a single-line password generator asks for a solution in "one line".
It seems to me that this is potentially a different class of challenge from code-golf, and for the nonce I've tagged ...
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Should we enforce the SO golfing rules here?
As noted, the quality of many questions on Code Golf SE leaves a lot to be desired.
dmckee mentioned about the SO golfing rules that have made golf contests in SO much more successful. I think we ...
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What should the policy be on questions currently being used for recruiting?
Companies sometimes hold mini programming contests in order to select potential employees based on the answers they give. We've already had 2 questions (this and this) of this type.
Clearly some of ...
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What's our policy on tags?
There are a lot of questions now that could be tagged: "sudoku", "sorting", "maze" etc.
Should we tag them?
What is the current policy on tagging? Tag everything that appears thrice or more? Tag at-...
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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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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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On GolfScript and language bigotry
I'd like to receive people's opinions on languages "designed for golfing", such as GolfScript and FlogScript. However, since there are no FlogScript submissions on the site as of current writing, this ...
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What should the policy on improving or incorporating other people's solutions be?
Sometimes, when looking at other people's golfing attempts, you see a trick that will improve your own one, or you might see a glaring improvement that is not entirely obvious to OP. For instance, in ...
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Should character counts be mandatory?
In code golfing questions it is tedious to copy-paste everyone's solution to see how long it is. Should having character counts for each submission be mandatory?
There are various examples of this ...
- 2,954
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Should non-standard compiler flags be included in character counts? [duplicate]
In some languages using a compiler flag might significantly shorten the source file, by making the compilation command longer. Should we make inclusion of the character count of the flag in the total ...
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What are the policies for threads relating to Facebook Puzzles, Project Euler, UVa, SPOJ, etc.?
Related question.
Questions from Facebook Puzzles, Project Euler, UVa, SPOJ, and the like do not expire, unlike Google Code Jam or TopCoder. Therefore, in order to be able to discuss such problems ...
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Are questions from Google Code Jam, TopCoder, etc. on-topic?
The original proposal is for "Code Golf and Programming Puzzles". I think this suggests that discussion of questions from programming contests should indeed be on-topic---as long as they're not ...
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