1A game in an amusement arcade in which players use a mallet to hit toy moles, which appear at random, back into their holes.

1. 1.1 Used with reference to a situation in which attempts to solve a problem are piecemeal or superficial, resulting only in temporary or minor improvement.
   the site's security team has an ongoing battle against spammers, but it's a game of whack-a-mole

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Well these guys believe in whack-a-mole.
   • Once I'm done playing whack-a-mole on the hype surrounding this issue, and we complete some other tests, I'll publish what we've found.
   • We work directly together playing whack-a-mole with their administrative problems.
   • The solution is to make either the browser or the application support the standards better, not to play whack-a-mole with each other trying to match features.
   • Most projects take a hybrid approach, mapping all comparable or easily translatable APIs, re-architecting where it doesn't slow things down and playing Whack-a-Mole with the remaining code until it builds and runs.
   • If the music industry is really concerned with protecting their investments, they could quit wasting their time with endless games of whack-a-mole (go after Napster, Audiogalaxy pops up, go after Audiogalaxy, hello Kazaa and so on).
   • History has proven over and over that chasing spam this way doesn't work because it's a never ending game of whack-a-mole that never gets anywhere.
   • If you do get into cover the shootouts that follow are pure digital whack-a-mole.
   • It was further suggested that money managers would become more important, because retail investors would not be able to play whack-a-mole (my term, not his).
   • I write about politics mostly because I think it's important to do so, but there are many things that are more enjoyable and ennobling than watching the two major political parties play Whack-A-Mole with one another.