@tjjfvi In retrospect something like shortest solutions to my test cases would have been a better scoring criterion, but it didn't occur to me at the time. Once it was posted though, I wouldn't have changed it to anything else. Seems unfair to move the goalposts once people could possibly be working on a solution.
@Timtech I'm not discussing a challenge. The challenge that was tangentially related to the argument spells out aserslgst. I still have no idea what you mean.
@Mego Bashing a political figure is not good? So regardless of what they say or do, we have to accept it and not criticize? What if the political figure is a dictator advocating genocide?
It seems that you could dig through the old questions and "rewrite" them to gain reputation without really working to earn it. But, meh, it's not really any of my business. :-)
@ETHproductions I know I don't post here very often any more so my opinion won't count for much, but closing a 5 and a half year old question as a duplicate of a 2 day old one seems akin to accusing an author of a 100 year old book of plagiarism because someone wrote something very similar last week. I can see why the author of the original challenge might feel slightly aggrieved.
@trichoplax No, 'angel', 'angen', 'llong' ... there's quite a few words that use ng in the middle or on the end where it's not just 'n+g'. In the Llanfair PG example the n and g have just been smooshed together from two other words - 'gwyn' then 'gyll' which is why it's two letters in that case but only 1 in 'angen'. Llanfair PG is just a great big made up tourist name anyway.
@trichoplax Not sure if you wanted an answer to that 'ph'/'ff' question... but it's because ph is the mutated form of p. So 'head' is 'pen', but put 'ei' (his or her) in front of it and it becomes either 'ei ben' == 'his head' or 'ei phen' == 'her head'. 'ph' is used instead of 'ff' because the link between the mutated and non-mutated forms is obvious, whereas using 'ff' would cause even more confusion (and mutations can be confusing enough as it is. :-)
@LegionMammal978 It used to be that when the sandbox got too full it would be retired and a new sandbox question created. My question was in the first sandbox meta question. When they got to about 10 they decided to merge them all to tidy things up a bit.
Not sure whether to keep the different sections of track /-\|as currently specified or change it to a single character - would that make it too simple?
@LegionMammal978 To be fair, when I posted it there were only a couple of new questions every day and it was really similar. So I abandoned it thinking it would never see the light of day again. I think it only really started gathering up-votes once all the old sandboxes were merged into one, by which time no-one remembered the bicycle round-trip question.
I think I've left enough time since the 'Help Mr Jones to enjoy his bicycle round-trip' question as suggested by dmckee when I first posted the question in the sandbox. :-)
@Katenkyo I have. I had no intention of replying to your last comment as I have nothing further to add. There's no point in getting into a back and forth over something we disagree on. I felt Justin's "he doesn't participate" was a poor reason for not considering someone as a moderator, particularly when they've done such a good job in the past. I replied to you as I felt that the stats don't show the whole picture.
By objective I mean that it's not a matter of opinion who has won. Shortest code, fastest code on a specific machine, etc. - all objective. You know before you post your answer how you stack up against the opposition. Number of votes - subjective. It's down to how many people like you, like your language, think your post is amusing, could be bothered to read your code, and also how quickly you get your answer in.
I still don't popularity contests because they're not objective. And I love a good golfing question. I can spend hours obsessively reducing my code a character at a time.
