Currently, the system protects any challenge that either:
- Has 3 deleted answers from new users
- Has multiple answers from new users within a short amount of time
We already have a policy that basically says "99.99% of questions here do not need to be protected". In short, we encourage answering more than asking, especially for newer users, and this feature prevents that. Questions should only be protected if they attract multiple invalid answers with very few valid ones, such as this one.
We currently have 21 protected questions (7 of which are locked and shouldn't even be considered), and all 14 of them are locked by users, not by Community. This is the appropriate way in my opinion that questions on this site should become protected: by high-rep users who understand if and when this is necessary.
Therefore, I'd like to request that automatic protection be turned off for the site (or rather, have the threshold be set at 10000 like meta).