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I'm referring of course to Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite amount of time, would one of them write Hamlet?

The question is legit and not bad, the first few answers were serious and good. However the quality is dropping in an exponential rate.

"You are a monkey ass. What a dumb ass. Now blog about your ass. "

"no, they would starve first, you also need an infinite numbers of bananans."

"Let me be the one that says NO. It is a bit hard to handle an infinite number of monkeys (because you will need an infinite number of bananas to feed them but if you agree to have a finite number of monkeys and infinite time, I would guess that considering the time it should take for this to happen It is likely that the universe would die before it actually does. ..."

(The last one doesn't compile too well because the lack of closing parenthesis too.)

These are not the things I expect to see on this website. While Pete's answer was good, and some of the other answers are addressing this from the mathematical point of view, well... there are more than a few which are really bad.

I have flagged an answer, but it seems reasonable to open this thread because this is not a local problem, it's turning into a global problem (on the thread-space, that is, not on a site level).
And furthermore, I want to know if there's a moderator policy for dealing with such threads, as the site grows bigger the probability of them popping up gets higher.

(In fact, this is the inverse of that guy who claimed to have invented new numbers and demanded us to research them. In this case, the question is legit and the answers are trolled)

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    $\begingroup$ "that guy who claimed to have invented new numbers and demanded us to research them" which question was that? $\endgroup$
    – wrongusername
    Jan 16 '11 at 18:48
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    $\begingroup$ @wrongusername: math.stackexchange.com/q/14879/622 $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Jan 16 '11 at 19:32
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This is what protection is for:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/new-protected-question-status/

A protected question is like a protected wikipedia article — it no longer allows additions by anonymous users.

No need to start a topic on meta, just flag it for moderator attention and indicate it needs protection.

(flag anything else that needs attention in the question, too, of course..)

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  • $\begingroup$ Duly noted! Thanks :) $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Jan 12 '11 at 9:51
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    $\begingroup$ Unfortunately, most of these terrible answers come from users with more than 200 rep. $\endgroup$
    – Mateen Ulhaq
    Jan 15 '11 at 5:45
  • $\begingroup$ @muntoo if the answers are problematic, vote them down $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jan 15 '11 at 5:53
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    $\begingroup$ I voted down about 6, and they keep coming, so I'm the one who's loosing rep. I've seen an answer yesterday that got +6, so 1 downvote won't make much of a difference. That's 60-2=58 rep for the answerer. $\endgroup$
    – Mateen Ulhaq
    Jan 15 '11 at 5:59
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    $\begingroup$ @muntoo yes, this is the issue with fun/humor questions. It probably has enough answers so I can close it... and I'll mark it community wiki as well so it's not a reputation factory from this point on. $\endgroup$
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jan 15 '11 at 6:02

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