In developing a puzzle collection for a class I teach, I found there are endless “junk” entries by users that were testing the UI. This makes is hard to find useful collections. I realize it would take some judgement, but I recommend removing puzzle collections that are clearly not useful - often with just one trivial entry - especially if not updated for say 6 months or so.
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Do you volonteer?
Lot of improvements are user made at first, and i share your opinion, like others i guess. Now it’s quite a piece of work.
Besides there is the problem of how you decide what is junk or not.
It is a fair observation. At this point we do not have the interface set up for puzzle deletion (and I don’t think it can be achieved from the front-end now) so currently nobody can really help even if they wanted to. Depending on how much work it would be to set and up and whether it is enough of a priority to spent that ammount of work, we can try pinging
@anoek Would it be too much work to give moderators or selected users the option to at least delete or potentially edit puzzle collections? I would be happy to slowly go through them and clean up the obvious candidates a little.
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One could equally just have a filter to mark and hide puzzles that are “junk”.
I do expect that at some point if we go around deleting puzzles somebody will be very annoyed that something they started on but didn’t get back to got deleted.
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Totally agree that there is a lot of junk puzzles.
If/when it is possible, I will help sorting them out.
But indeed the criteria for what is junk should be clear.
A categorisation in the puzzle section would be great.
Now you have puzzles, joseki collection and tutorials in the puzzles section.
Separate categories for these three please.
Here are two threads I started, maybe there is something for you in it.
There are about 2500 - it would be time consuming but I would be willing to take an initial crack at it if the UI was there. There are about 800 with just one entry. I think it would be hard to make an exact rule and there are downsides to any decision but that should not lead to “paralysis by analysis”. One thing that might help is a disclaimer such as “Moderators will occasionally prune out abandoned old entries with low ratings and minimal content.”
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Great idea.
Another thing that could be added is to give by default a “can be deleted” option and then the creator has to change it into “important please do not delete” if so.
I think this has been covered already maybe but this isn’t a reason not to go round deleting things that look like junk. I think the benefit outweighs the risk here.
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I am kind of worried that would add another layer of extra work and not really necassary UI elements. Almost nobody is likely to disable such filter to look at junk puzzles I don’t think 
It would be awesome if instead of deleting we would hide the puzzle to all but the creator and leave them a notification or something, but for starters having the option to simply delete puzzles would go a long way anyway. Yeah, there is some slight risk of annoyance, but selecting puzzles that have been created long ago, have only one entry or no solution etc… These are most likely just junk and there is not that much potential to ruin someone’s hard work, since not that much work has been placed into those anyway.
I still think it would be a good start to simply delete those. And maybe we will got more developement later, or if anoek provides some backend support others might pile up more enhancmenets then.
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Since it may be some time before a fix is available, you could, in the meantime, use Cho Chikun’s elementary and intermediate L&D puzzles, available in the first few pages of the Puzzles tab. I also think highly of Fran’s Library by Francisa, on the first page of the tab.
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Thanks but actually I am happy with my collection “Jim’s Class”. I was just thinking about improving the system for other users.
I don’t know what you mean. If I want to play around with puzzles just for myself, we might have someone like @AdamR going around deeming my experiment unworthy to exist and burning it 
While we’re at it, why not make it a privilege to make puzzles, that you have to request to be a puzzle creator in order to be able to make puzzles, then no one can make junk puzzles
Anyway, I agree that maybe clearing up some of the puzzles might make others more visible, but I’m not super convinced even deleting the obvious junk will help that much.
It won’t help with any other problems with the puzzles section either as it stands, that is people creating puzzles and then abandoning them or their account, so that there’s no way to fix mistakes. Puzzles can just be incorrect anyway, or incorrectly rated so beginners look at a set of puzzles rated 25kyu but they really aren’t 25kyu in any sense.
So that I mean the puzzles section probably won’t be that much better off.
We already have the option of making a collection private if you are just playing with it for yourself :P. I think it is only fair to have some completely basic standart for public collections. As in having a sensible goal and solution.
Well no, but it is still a step in the right direction as far as I am concerned… Obviously I would welcome other improvements too, but this would be at least a start.
Well then maybe the answer is to flag puzzles as worthy, officially approved (Twitter blue tick style) rather than deleting/flagging as junk.
And puzzle creators can request the seal of approval.
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Well I think a sensible standard would be things like don’t make it full of racism or something else offensive.
I’m not sure why the tool is available to people if we don’t want them to use it.
Imagine if we went around deleting peoples demo boards because we thought they weren’t being used to a certain standard.
Or if we went around deleting peoples accounts because we thought it was a waste of a username and they haven’t played some games in ages. (I’ve seen that suggested before)
I think making the puzzles private also makes it much more annoying to share them with other people.
So the guidelines will be something like “keep your puzzle private until it looks like it’s not thrash and then you can safely make it public and share it with people” ?
IMHO, rating and number of view already do this.
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Not officially, that’s just crowd sourced approval or otherwise.
Who will decide what is officially approved?
I think the difference is that puzzles seem offered as a feature for the public to use whereas demo boards are not
Well, without being too big headed, I was thinking people like me!