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I often enjoy designing problems of my own, generally Olympiad-type proof questions. It is often hard to assess the difficulty level of the questions I have designed and hence I was wondering if I could post them on MSE for a "test solve" i.e. other users have a go at solving the problem, post their solution and let me know how difficult they think it is. Is this acceptable practice? If not on the site, is there some chatroom that I can use to do these kind of "test solves"?

Additional Note: One point of scepticism could be that I don't really have a solution to my question and am just trying to get around the "show your work" barrier on MSE. To avoid this, I could add my solution as a spoiler in the question.

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    $\begingroup$ They are not exactly the same, but you might have a look at som older discussions here on meta: Competitions on MSE, Using Math.SE for contests or Are small competitions allowed? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Jun 14, 2022 at 19:31
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    $\begingroup$ Personally (with my moderator hat off), I don't like this style of question. My opinion is that questions on Math SE should be actual questions, and not puzzles for others to solve. My guess is that much of the rest of the community agrees (the answer posted by Ethakka appam with Chai and the upvotes there seem to give credence to this guess). However, there was an attempt to spin-off a "puzzling" style math site in the past, which failed, so if there is any room on the SE network for this kind of question, it is likely on Math SE. $\endgroup$
    – Xander Henderson Mod
    Jun 14, 2022 at 22:42
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    $\begingroup$ Short version: as a user, I don't like this style of question; as a moderator, we haven't had this conversation in a while, and I would be interested to know what the rest of the community thinks. $\endgroup$
    – Xander Henderson Mod
    Jun 14, 2022 at 22:43

2 Answers 2

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I don't think it would be well received by avg MSE crowd. If your goal is to test the difficulty of your problem, then you can try AOPS. If your goal is to check your problem and your given solution to makes sense, then most likely it is on topic here.

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I don't know the official policy, but this seems fine to me, so long as each post leads off with the context that you've provided in this question.

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