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Keeping parallelism with "things to avoid"
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xnor
xnor

Don't requireRequiring minimum scores

In short, don't post a code golf that says "Your code has to be shorter than 100 bytes" (the same applies to any other winning criterion). The usual motivation is that the author found some code somewhere and challenges people to beat the score of that code. That's a fine motivation for a challenge, but actually requiring all answers to be better than that benchmark is incredibly detrimental to the challenge. It doesn't increase competition between answers that are better than the requirement. But it does disallow answers which are worse than the limit but might contain interesting ideas which the better answers could also benefit from, and it also rules out some languages entirely which are simply incapable of beating the given score. There's also the possibility that you've set the limit too low and made the challenge impossible. Additionally, most often answers aren't originally posted with the best possible score, but are later improved because other people give suggestions. This would be impossible if the first attempt wasn't allowed to be posted.

Most importantly though, all that a minimum score is saying is "if you're not good enough, you can't participate", which I think is plainly rude.

Don't require minimum scores

In short, don't post a code golf that says "Your code has to be shorter than 100 bytes" (the same applies to any other winning criterion). The usual motivation is that the author found some code somewhere and challenges people to beat the score of that code. That's a fine motivation for a challenge, but actually requiring all answers to be better than that benchmark is incredibly detrimental to the challenge. It doesn't increase competition between answers that are better than the requirement. But it does disallow answers which are worse than the limit but might contain interesting ideas which the better answers could also benefit from, and it also rules out some languages entirely which are simply incapable of beating the given score. There's also the possibility that you've set the limit too low and made the challenge impossible. Additionally, most often answers aren't originally posted with the best possible score, but are later improved because other people give suggestions. This would be impossible if the first attempt wasn't allowed to be posted.

Most importantly though, all that a minimum score is saying is "if you're not good enough, you can't participate", which I think is plainly rude.

Requiring minimum scores

In short, don't post a code golf that says "Your code has to be shorter than 100 bytes" (the same applies to any other winning criterion). The usual motivation is that the author found some code somewhere and challenges people to beat the score of that code. That's a fine motivation for a challenge, but actually requiring all answers to be better than that benchmark is incredibly detrimental to the challenge. It doesn't increase competition between answers that are better than the requirement. But it does disallow answers which are worse than the limit but might contain interesting ideas which the better answers could also benefit from, and it also rules out some languages entirely which are simply incapable of beating the given score. There's also the possibility that you've set the limit too low and made the challenge impossible. Additionally, most often answers aren't originally posted with the best possible score, but are later improved because other people give suggestions. This would be impossible if the first attempt wasn't allowed to be posted.

Most importantly though, all that a minimum score is saying is "if you're not good enough, you can't participate", which I think is plainly rude.

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Martin Ender Mod
Martin Ender Mod

Don't require minimum scores

In short, don't post a code golf that says "Your code has to be shorter than 100 bytes" (the same applies to any other winning criterion). The usual motivation is that the author found some code somewhere and challenges people to beat the score of that code. That's a fine motivation for a challenge, but actually requiring all answers to be better than that benchmark is incredibly detrimental to the challenge. It doesn't increase competition between answers that are better than the requirement. But it does disallow answers which are worse than the limit but might contain interesting ideas which the better answers could also benefit from, and it also rules out some languages entirely which are simply incapable of beating the given score. There's also the possibility that you've set the limit too low and made the challenge impossible. Additionally, most often answers aren't originally posted with the best possible score, but are later improved because other people give suggestions. This would be impossible if the first attempt wasn't allowed to be posted.

Most importantly though, all that a minimum score is saying is "if you're not good enough, you can't participate", which I think is plainly rude.