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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).

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Note that the link to the list of protected questions is 10k+ only \$\endgroup\$ Apr 16, 2021 at 3:03

1 Answer 1

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We have two settings we can change and they relate to your two bullet points. For the second, it seems like that just needs to be disabled.

The first one is the closest I can get to your request to protect questions that get a lot of bad answers and few good ones but...

  • It won't protect if the answers are coming from "old" users.
  • It doesn't count the total number of answers, so will protect questions that have lots of answers in general.

I'm going to go ahead and change the site setting for the auto protection for answers from new users for now. If y'all tell me to do both, I can do both, too, or we can wait a month and see if changing just one setting is enough.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I think the first bullet point is generally what causes our very popular easier challenges (see the Hello, World! challenge) to become protected, which is a much rarer occurrence than questions that get protected when they hit HNQ and we have a brief wave of new users (second bullet point), so I think this change should mitigate most of the Community protections :) \$\endgroup\$ May 12, 2021 at 13:13

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