@Khale_Kitha Story of my life.

lol

@Matt No, it's laughing with them, unfortunately.

q_a, I can finally get that Note Performer addon, but.....

My annoying buying habits are getting in the way.

Are we talking about The big bang theory?

I've adopted my MMO buying habits, in real life...

I won't buy something unless I have 5x the money to spend. Lol

(outside of necessities)

yes, manshu

hahaha

yeah I know that feeling

which is annoying when something costs $130

yeah exactly

I don't even look at the numbers

I just hate spending money

For me, it's not annoying. It's just un-buyable

My wife has to be the one to convince me to pull the trigger

OK so in all the talk about the SE features that we have vs. the SE features that would do us good...

I feel like we should be able to lock posts once they've been answered

I disagree.

like, still editable, just no more answers once there's been an accepted answer

It will also stop the incoming good answers

I think it would lock out a facet of questions that doesn't really have a need to be locked out

because people won't stop complaining about getting new/spam answers on questions that have answers

so why don't we just prevent people from doing that

especially in the cases of lateral thinking, there might a better answer than the intended answer that's found after the fact

Not only that, but the non-puzzles that this site was BETA'ed for

@manshu by our own definitions there's no such thing as a better answer

I mean

@question_asker who gave that definition ?

the choice is: stop fucking crying about people posting bad answers, or lock the posts

Isn't that what downvotes are for?

not when people are vocally throwing tantrums over the fact that the answers exist in the first place

You can just ask moderators to protect the posts.

what about a rep threshold to answer solved questions?

@Matt none

@manshu why

hey guys this is kinda funny - look at the newest question

OP asks for someone to put a bounty on it immediately after it was asked

oh geez

too hard for me

and he was begging for upvotes before i edited it out

puzzling.stackexchange.com/posts/33308/revisions

oh jeeez hahaha

but seriously

I rarely bother to vote for "too broad" ones, but...

yeah....I'll go ahead on that one

we don't even allow lateral thinking problems, so I don't see how "we'd need to let people still add answers to lateral thinking questions" is even a valid response

what do you mean, we "don't allow lateral thinking problems"?

is it because they're too broad?

I mean, we objectively don't

i think we SHOULDN'T allow them but AFAIK currently they're allowed

we shut them down every time they show up

with maybe a very small number of exceptions

they're not explicitly disallowed, they're just disallowed by fiat

fair enough

There's 4 on the main page, right now, with answers - but I don't remember many others even appearing, lately, besides those.

but i think that's just because there are too many equally valid answers - i.e. most lateral thinking questions are too broad

but yeah, given our rules and expectations, why should we not lock posts after an answer has been accepted?

It's just a question category where it's too easy to make a non-answerable question.

I mean, answer that in a way that would definitely be acceptable on this site with the people in charge

it's still possible to post better answers even after an answer has been accepted

but...

a lot of the time, new people to the site just accept whatever answer they see even if it isn't correct

is that true?

i've seen it several times

I mean, if that's true, fine, but I'd like to see any evidence of that

it's certainly not overwhelmingly true

it happened with the plastic bag riddle

overwhelming? nah, i agree

it's not common

but it happens

the majority of the time, we get people either posting spam or the exact answer that's already been accepted

Yeah, but we can't fix stupid.

and people get extremely het up over that

you can prevent a lot of it, though

I mean, I'm not saying "don't let anybody answer questions", I'm saying "there's this thing that happens a lot and every time it happens people complain a lot and there's one thing we could try to implement that would absolutely prevent it"

I think it would just cause people to go even longer before using the checkmark on certain puzzle categories.

We'd have a lot more forgotten questions.

I doubt it

Oh, I know it would happen.

puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/33307/in-plain-sight-i-lie/…

locking a question is not the solution bcz it is against the free will of the user of posting answer. Who knows if the new answer is way better than the accepted answer

Those questions are designed to get multiple answers, and if they know that it'll stop future answers, they won't checkmark.

@manshu You're talking about some hypothetical scenario

and also

comment deleted, f"?

you're talking about something we demonstrably do not allow

so yeah, whatever, let's keep throwing temper tantrums about something we could avoid

Sure we do.

throwing temper tantrums?

have ... have you seen the way people react?

it embarrassing, quite frankly

That Rahul guy is at it again

this answer puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/33309/20151

i'm gonna need some evidence of these "temper tantrums"

They are human beings. And human beings are always embarrassing.

yeah see this is what I don't get

you're very selective as to which times you don't like something

me?

well, people who have problems with "bad" questions/answers in general

"broad" questions, bad answers, etc.

everybody's "only human" to you, right now

huh? i'm not sure what you're talking about - "only human"?

but when it came up last time, or when it will come up in the future, it's a "huge problem" that is irreversibly damaging the site

you're claiming people throw temper tantrums about spam and bad answers, and you'd need to show me evidence before i can accept that

irreversibly damaging? when the hell did i say that?

yeah, i'm not sure i agree with manshu

OK well, when people agree with each other, I can only go with what I see the people who all agree with each other saying

you still haven't shown any evidence for these "temper tantrums" that you claim happen a lot

Well I don't keep a database of everything that happens in chat or in comments on meta

but man

it comes up a lot

how many times have we had conversations over "too broad", for example?

we've had them pretty frequently, but they haven't been "temper tantrums"

maybe not literal temper tantrums, but I know you understand the concept of hyperbole

....lol

yes, but you're misrepresenting my positions

I never said they were yours

calm, reasonable discussions are not temper tantrums

not even close

but like, sorry, I'm going to characterize people calling low-quality answers harmful as like unto a temper tantrum

because that shows a massive lack of perspective

no harm has ever come to anybody on this site from a low-quality answer

that has objectively never happened.

and my point is, if the influx of low-quality answers is something people are concerned about (which, again: demonstrably the case), then at least consider a solution among the many things we might someday ask devs for

that was how this whole thing was introduced

we are considering it!

i agree that it would be useful in some scenarios, but it might prohibit some high-quality answers

and unfortunately, because of the SE model we can't really do much to deviate from what we already have now

yes I know this last part

(which i am not happy with at all, and i know you aren't either)

the thing about the high-quality answers though is... so many suggestions have been turned down for the opposite reason

if we do _____, a lot of bad answers might come in

why are we suddenly so sure that these hypothetical answers are actually going to be good?

can you give some examples of things that have been rejected for that reason?

i'm not doubting you, just curious

The point is that shutting down the entire site (ie, questions that have answers) isn't going to help anyone. And some of the questions on the site are specifically designed for multiple answers.

It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

this is why I'm saying it's selective. we're concerned about bad answers coming in if the proposed change is permissive, but concerned about keeping good answers out if the proposed change is restrictive. which one are we afraid of? let's keep our stories straight here.

KK, i'd argue that having multiple answers makes for a bad puzzle (though it would be acceptable for questions about puzzles)

nobody's shutting down the entire site

that was never a part of any suggestion

There are certain questions where it is the actual question, Deu - and they are highly voted by the community.

q_a, can you give some examples of things that have been rejected for potentially allowing too many bad answers?

I specifically said questions that have answers.

if a question legitimately has potentially many good answers... then we just wouldn't check the checkmark

Except we will - because people want a question checkmarked.

Then I guess it's that person's loss. They would have the ability to uncheck, as they currently do

nah KK, his idea could work - they do it on PPCG sometimes

Saying "we just wouldn't check the checkmark" when it deviates from the entire functionality of the site is nonsense

I mean, I'm not even trying to present a fully-formed feature concept here

^

I'm just asking why we don't also talk about this when we talk about all the other feature differences we want

and yeah, there's no reason it couldn't be done

because AFAIK nobody's brought it up before (though i may very well be wrong)

it just, I dunno. it seems like it really riles people up when we get a bunch of spam answers, or duplicate answers

i dont think it happens often enough to be a huge issue

the most i've seen is mild annoyance over bad answers

those answers just get downvoted

there was Yet Another meta question about it recently, and a whole bunch of talk in chat (about the effects of a question ending up on HNQ and getting lots of answers)

we Go. Out. Of. Our. Way. to close questions with potentially-many answers

what universe are people in where they think we suddenly accept them?

hell. manshu VTCs questions for having three answers when none of the answers make any sense with regard to the question

thats a separate issue... i think

it's literally the same issue

mmm

we close bad questions, q_a - not just because they have lots of bad answers, but because being too broad is a symptom of bad-puzzle-ness

if our policy is to close questions with multiple valid answer (which it demonstrably is), then there's no excuse to not lock questions that have an accepted answer

it's not just "more answers bad, less answers good"

locking questions would only (maybe) solve part of the issue

I'm well aware of this, and what I said still applies

since locking questions wouldnt stop broad questions from being asked

it would solve the issue of people posting new (spam OR already-posted) answers to questions with accepted answers.

@WesleySitu and nothing could stop that

right, but good answers generally aren't even possible with too-broad questions

what is this thing where you want to shoot down a suggestion because it doesn't solve every potential problem

they are still possible with questions with accepted answers though

yeah, Wesley, not sure if that's a valid objection

doesn't seem like one to me - it's pretty much unrelated

oh, i didnt mean to shoot anything down

again, look, literally the way this conversation started was me going "ok so we clearly don't like it when people flood in, why hasn't [this idea] been suggested yet"

just considering things from many angles

and y'all flew down my throat, acting like we've ever been friendly to questions with multiple answers

yes, q_a, and?

huh? i don't think we "flew down your throat" at all

please, I'm begging you, show me ten examples of questions with multiple answers that weren't ever VTCed as too broad

i think we presented some reasonable downsides to it, and that's about it

surely if, as you say, we're friendly to them, you could show me 10 out of however many questions we have

well, pretty much anything where people have worked together, to start

(to be fair, @Deusovi, you came in after people had already started shooting it down)

(fair enough)

eg my chess fortnight, Alconja's dream puzzle that i don't remember the name of

there's also that "list of bounties with no deadlines" thread

and any of those is a candidate for future answers

on the one hand, I almost see a problem that somebody mentioned upthread, where people might wait to accept an answer but... that already happens

i think some questions that KK refers to as where there are multiple answers would be things like the competition kind of questions like find the best word that fulfills X conditions

or thing likes puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/31247/… or anything else using that tag

Among others

there are already a bunch of puzzles that (to my goddang chagrin) have been answered but look like they haven't, since the OP wasn't satisfied with a 99.99999999999% correct answer

yeah, i hate that too q_a

@Khale_Kitha but we're very unfriendly to that

And disagreeing with the reasoning for an idea isn't shooting it down. You get too friggen offended when people don't agree with you.

honestly i think the "kill the sun" question was too broad

that's a very clear example of a puzzle with multiple valid solutions

yeah, i voted to close when it was originally posted

it could be fixed with something like "find the arrangement with the least live cells in the red region" or something

but right now it's too broad

And I don't see anything wrong with it at all. The point is that people have different opinions on the site - that's the entire reason we use voting.

no, that's demonstrably too broad

multiple valid answers, no way to say that any one is "better" than any of the others

that's pretty much the definition of too broad

@Khale_Kitha yeah but voting is pointless when something is closed

...sure

I mean, you guys literally argued with me immediately, saying that the reason my idea was bad was that puzzles with multiple valid answers exist

i dont think your idea is bad, we just need to consider some cases and modify it a bit

No I didn't

as you said, you didn't provide a completely thought out idea

I said it that I thought it would lock out a facet of questions that don't need to be locked out.

so us discussing the downsides gives us some room to flesh things out

I'm allowed to disagree.

and what is that facet?

An example was given above - and there are others.

i think that the idea wouldn't be good, but i don't agree with the reasoning of the others - open-ended questions that aren't too broad ("find the shortest English word that..."; "find the CGOL configuration with the least amount of live cells that...") can have accepted answers, yet those answers can nearly always be improved if you can squeeze one letter out or one live cell out

because, as it is, the only thing it "locks out" are questions that we already don't like

Seriously stop friggen using the word 'we'

Because it's pointless.

plus there's the "bounty without deadline" thing that i mentioned above

I say "we" because it doesn't matter what I (or you) think as long as there are five people who go along with what has been considered policy for as long as I've been here

Yes, it does.

That's the entire point.

no

How many times has that one puzzle been closed and re-opened now

that's far more than 5 people's thoughts

I can't undo anyone's vote to close

I can be one of five people that undoes it

...and?

but if I can't rally four more people to click the reopen button (or if four more people who want to reopen don't have the rep to do it) it doesn't matter