Clarification about the Number of Submissions Allowed for the POTWs

[Chris L T521]

To the MHB community,

There have been a few questions that have been brought to our attention regarding the number of submissions made by members for each week's POTW. We first want to say that there is nothing wrong with submitting corrections to a solution if you find a mistake in your original answer; that was the primary reason why we enabled the option that sends you a PM of the solution you submitted. There's no need to feel guilty or sorry about this! We all make mistakes sometimes, and since you're given a week to submit an answer, this gives you time to make any changes you see fit.

However, we want to make it known that there should be some sort of reasonable cap imposed on the number of times you can resubmit an answer after you make your initial submission. After a discussion with anemone and MarkFL, we agreed to cap the number of submissions any member can make for each our our POTWs at four: the original submission plus a maximum of three corrections. If you submit four or more corrections for a given POTW, we will ignore it (even if it's correct) and "grade" your third correction.

Thanks again to those of you who participate in our weekly POTWs. We look forward to your continual participation as we approach the two year anniversary of the POTW!

 

[mathbalarka]

Good idea. Very effective anti-spam measure.

Now, I was thinking, is it not possible to set up a moderation ability on that forum such that one can edit/delete owned posts? I guess not and I might have missed some of the discussions you had on this matter on the announcement forum (if I did, apologies)

 

[MarkFL]

Good idea. Very effective anti-spam measure.

Now, I was thinking, is it not possible to set up a moderation ability on that forum such that one can edit/delete owned posts? I guess not and I might have missed some of the discussions you had on this matter on the announcement forum (if I did, apologies)

The permissions could be changed so that registered users would be able to edit their own posts, however, this could lead to confusion and extra work for anemone and Chris L T521 since they would not necessarily know when someone makes such an edit.

By requiring a user to submit a new solution for any desired changes, this ensures that our POTW posters are explicitly aware of any such revisions. This means that once they read a solution and grade it for correctness, they are assured it will not change, and thus they will not need to read that same thread again.

Also, registered users are given a time limit to edit their own posts forum wide, and this global setting would have to be altered to make allowing users to edit their own POTW submissions viable.

I know you are aware of the utility in restricting the time during which registered users are allowed to edit their posts, but for anyone reading this post who does not know, it is an effective anti-spam measure many sites use, and is in fact used on all the sites on which I moderate/administrate. Consider a human spammer who registers and posts innocent looking posts which draw no negative attention or suspicion from the staff. If a lengthy time limit is given for the editing of posts, this spammer could come back after the thread is no longer receiving replies and change their posts to spam content, and it would not show up as a new post, thereby making its detection particularly difficult.