21.06.2020, 19:25
I agree, there is a problem that is getting bigger. But it's hard to find a solution and it's hard to discuss that openly, because almost all people have no idea what a suggested solution means behind the scene regarding the software and the administration of the site. The problem is not a few people flooding the portal with puzzles, so you can't just set a quota per person. That would not reduce the number by a significant amount. A general quota would lead to more bad blood and problems than it would solve imho (and thats not even thinking about how to implement that). And if you restrict posting altogether, where do you draw the line?
One very strict solution would be to not allow posting of puzzles for all freshly created accounts for some months to stop the flood of new authors for some time. Some of the old ones will probably lose interest or reduce their postings, so hopefully the total number of puzzles will go down to a appropriate amount again. In some months we can see how to continue from there. Sure, thats not nice for new people and some real gems will not be published. Is that more important than the health of our community? I don't know, probably not.
When the portal was created, the amount of handcrafted puzzles was really limited. Nowadays there are so many sources of great puzzles, that the hard part is getting solvers and feedback. Sure, you can create it in applets like puzz.link and post it on Twitter or a blog or maybe a Facebook group, but barely anybody will recognize it. One great part of the portal also was always, that it is not limited to some standard types and variants.
Someone will have to make a decision that will inevitably hurt some people in one way or another, and I'm glad I'm not the one.
One very strict solution would be to not allow posting of puzzles for all freshly created accounts for some months to stop the flood of new authors for some time. Some of the old ones will probably lose interest or reduce their postings, so hopefully the total number of puzzles will go down to a appropriate amount again. In some months we can see how to continue from there. Sure, thats not nice for new people and some real gems will not be published. Is that more important than the health of our community? I don't know, probably not.
When the portal was created, the amount of handcrafted puzzles was really limited. Nowadays there are so many sources of great puzzles, that the hard part is getting solvers and feedback. Sure, you can create it in applets like puzz.link and post it on Twitter or a blog or maybe a Facebook group, but barely anybody will recognize it. One great part of the portal also was always, that it is not limited to some standard types and variants.
Someone will have to make a decision that will inevitably hurt some people in one way or another, and I'm glad I'm not the one.