34
I don't think this is a frequent enough issue to warrant using one of the custom close reason slots. But I do think it's a big enough issue to warrant not only a downvote and a close vote but also a delete vote. Having questions which ask for malicious code can only be detrimental to the reputation of this community, so they should be expunged as quickly as ...
34
Problems I see with locking the Showcase
We have practically nowhere else to post what we can post on the showcase. You can always put them in the language's readme on GitHub, but I prefer the showcase because it's a ubiquitous place to post interesting snippets and tutorials. You can find a snippet about pretty much every language there, rather than having ...
27
Keep It, but...
...we should definitely update e.g. the tag info. The recent discussions have not been unproductive, and I think we have better guidelines than ever before but at the moment they are still all buried in meta questions/answers.
Example: As far as I know it is the first time that the term validity criterion emerged so clearly which definitely ...
27
Automate the catalog
We should replace the manually curated answer list with a Stack Snippet.
I hope nobody will actually object to this, but this should at the very least serve as a to-do list.
24
Let's make an exception
This seems to be what the community as a whole wants. I don't think this is an optimal solution (and would personally to prefer to leave it as it is), but since the showcase is both too broad and dearly beloved by the community, it seems like a viable compromise.
Below, I list some potential changes to the showcase that could both ...
23
Yes, Unlock and Reopen
At least until we arrive at a more clear concensus on what to do with it, if anything.
21
Yes, I think "editor golf" is perfectly on-topic here, assuming solutions are submitted entirely in keystrokes and not, for example, with mouse clicks or menu buttons.
Vim, Emacs, and most other text-based editors have a way to execute arbitrary keystrokes, making a sequence of keystrokes almost like a "program." For example, one can execute Vim keystrokes ...
21
As I said in the question, I think we need to distinguish several cases here. (This post got a bit long. There's a summary at the bottom, but if you disagree with it, I'd appreciate if you took the time to read my arguments as well and bring up your position in comments or a separate answer.)
Subchallenges without any interaction
These are the plain "golf ...
21
The showcase is part of a unique category of pop-cons that should be on topic.
Before I explain this, consider for a second why we banished code-trolling, underhanded and now are considering eliminating popularity-contest: site quality. During the great code trolling apocalypse, Doorknob and Martin made excellent arguments against it that more or less ...
19
Make it a non-challenge question
We do allow these, and the showcase is by far more similar to tips questions than to our usual programming contests. This should encompass unaccepting the answer with the highest vote count, removing the popularity-contest tag, and adding a dedicated showcase tag which makes clear that this will be the only question of its ...
19
Add a disclaimer:
Note: New straightforward "Do X without Y" questions are not considered novel anymore and may be closed as duplicates of this question.
But I think it should be worded better.
Or as DJMcMayhem suggested:
This question was well-received when it was posted, but challenges like this, asking answerers to Do X without using Y are likely ...
16
Should the tag be split?
I think it's clear that the majority want to see popularity contests continue, but also the majority find problems with most challenges that are posted with this tag.
Is part of the problem that the tag is used for more than one thing?
There seem to be at least two different challenge types that are tagged popularity-contest.
...
16
We need an honest intro for new askers
We need a frank explanation of what makes a good challenge. Not something that lists all rules and possibilities, but advice like you'd give a friend who is new to the site and posting a challenge for the first time. It might say things like "Post in the Sandbox first" and "Challenges like X are allowed, but you'll ...
15
We should allow computational challenges of all sorts
tl;dr: This site is about puzzles based on programming, not puzzles whose solutions are programs. This challenge qualifies.
We currently accept a variety of challenges that are not based directly on code. For instance, we accept algorithm-only challenges. The accepted answer for why we should accept ...
15
I would really like to make this challenge type work. (Full disclosure: partly because I seem to have come up with with a fairly popular challenge idea based on it. Mostly, though, because I genuinely think it's fun and novel.) But I do see a lot of problems.
Answers on SE have no inherent order, and forcing one onto them just feels odd. In the case of a ...
15
Closing this challenge is pointless even if out-of-scope
This challenge is still opened and…
…it still receives interesting answers showcasing new languages. I still receive upvotes semi-often on that challenge suggesting that people are still interested in seeing languages snippets and explanations.
What closing this challenge would do:
Absolutely nothing ...
15
Use Stack Snippets to fold answers
Everything except the language name and a factoid could be folding by wrapping it into a stack snippet. That would condense each page into 30 stubs, which can be expanded with just two clicks. This serves multiple purposes:
You don't have to load images of answers you're not interested in reading or have already read. ...
14
This is, perhaps, a comment prompted by Alex A.'s post, but too long to be one.
Why exactly do we need challenges to have a clear winner?
To accept an answer, maybe? But only 62% of questions have an accepted answer. The goal of this site doesn't seem to be to find the one best solution, but for people to have fun making their own. Even in popularity ...
14
Keep it
There's nothing wrong specifically with popularity-contest (indeed it is a good scoring criteria for several popular kinds of challenges, such as image-processing). The main issue is that people misunderstand that popularity-contest does not make your challenge exempt from the standard rules of what is on-topic here (an issue in particular is that ...
12
As I said in the question, I'm not a fan of these, and would prefer if they were simply off-topic.
That being said, I think they violate 3(e) of Stack Exchange's Terms of Service. But even if you could throw that hammer at every such question, it would still be nice to have an explicit close vote reason, since we do get these at least every other month (I ...
12
Code Katas are a great idea in general, but I don't see how they fit into this community. The main requirement for every challenge posted here is that it has to have an objective winning criterion. Code Katas are looking for good solutions, whatever that means in the language you're currently using. But that's something you can't really quantify. Whether any ...
12
Make a new category
If the site benefits from this challenge, it should benefit from others like it. What if someone posts another showcase challenge that would be just as popular and well received, but never gets a chance to gather a following because it gets closed immediately?
We should think about what qualities make such challenges valuable and ...
11
Yes, they are on topic
To address some common reasons why people think they shouldn't be on topic:
They don't have a winning criterion. By default, the winning criterion is first posted. Even if you don't like this criterion, it is objective. That said, first posted should be your last choice; the OP needs to attempt to identify other possible scoring ...
11
No, don't close it, don't lock it
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Unless there are severe quality issues, don't let bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo get in the way of a challenge that many people are clearly entertained by on a site that (I believe) is, at-the-core, about entertainment — about enjoying programming.
11
Make it a community wiki
This is a perfect fit.
Questions should be manually converted to community wiki when they are marginal fits or 'list of X' questions that contain enough value to avoid deletion.
The showcase should obviously not be deleted, but it is a 'list of X' question, and considered too broad or even off topic by some members of the ...
11
Keep searching for better alternatives
As before, I still believe that the showcase deserves to be a proper wiki, quite possibly outside PPCG, free from restrictions on character count, size, Markdown, JavaScript, pagination, etc.
While there are existing alternatives – e.g., Esolang could showcase the recreational programming languages – the community ...
11
Remove the one vote at a time rule
Additional snippets could be added at will and would not be restricted to one snippet per character count. I don't think character count should be a limiting factor at all; it hinders showcasing intentionally verbose languages.
11
There are various scenarios, and I don't think the answer is necessarily the same for all of them.
I assume for all of these scenarios that the content is explicitly licensed in a way which makes it legally ok to post it here, and that the source is properly credited in the question.
Scenario: borrowed spec, new challenge
It may happen that while browsing ...
10
Combine answers in the same language (whenever possible)
Ideally, we would have one page per language, but there's no way to make that happen using PPCG's Q&A format.
Consolidating multiple answers in a single language into a single post should be done whenever possible, both to make finding and reading about your language of interest easier and to ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible