Protected status is an often-overlooked feature of Stack Exchange. It’s based loosely on Wikipedia’s semi-protection, and like that tool is meant to be a reaction to persistent abuse from anonymous or unproven participants: when a page attracts a lot of noise or vandalism from outside the community, Protecting it reduces the amount of clean-up needed later on.
Protected questions are not answerable by folks who haven’t earned at least 10 reputation from activity on the site where the question resides. This effectively means you need to have posted an answer somewhere else that’s attracted an up-vote or a question that’s earned two.
Originally, this functionality was limited to moderators, but during the past several years we’ve made a few changes to encourage more productive use:
-
Privileged users can protect and unprotect any question over a day old.
-
The system (in the guise of the Community user) will automatically protect questions that’ve had either
- 3 answers from new users deleted – this handles questions that tend to attract large amounts of spam over time.
- 5* answers from new users scoring <= 0 posted in the past 24 hours - this handles questions that are somewhat topical, and are attracting large numbers of "participants" who aren't actually contributing anything useful.
*This value can be higher or lower on sites that have demonstrated “special” patterns of new-user interaction.
Guidelines for Protecting questions:¶
-
Do protect questions that are attracting a lot of non-answers or very poor answers (spam, etc.) from new users.
-
Don’t protect questions just because they’re linked to on a high-traffic news site like Reddit or Ars Technica. While there’s certainly some correlation between sudden spikes in popularity and associated non-answers, not all popular questions suffer from this.
-
Do unprotect questions that aren’t currently attracting a lot of attention and don’t have a long history of unproductive answers.
Judicious use of this feature is critical to allowing these sites to handle large amounts of external attention, but over-using it breaks the system: Stack Exchange sites depend on a constant influx of new blood, both to answer new questions and provide updated information on old ones. When in doubt, err on the side of letting new users prove themselves before locking them out.
Subscribe via RSS
8 Comments
Have you considered adding a timer to the protection. Let it fall off after 3-7 days unless a mod says make me permanent?
As a non-moderator, how should I ascertain whether attention is ‘recent’ in order to meet the unprotecting criteria?
@Chad
Why would you want to do that? Bikeshed questions don’t get any better with age.
We’ve considered it, @Chad. Not convinced it’s necessary just yet though – would like to see how willing folks are to remove it when unnecessary first. There are a lot of questions that will tend to attract noise in perpetuity, so a fair number of existing questions would need perma-protect anyway.
Is there a mechanism to discover protected questions other than googling for them? In the 10k tools for example, maybe a list of recently protected questions or a list of questions protected for more than >=N days with <=N views or some such thing. Clearly this would have to be thought through better than I have here, to prevent Wikipedia-style edit wars protecting and unprotecting if they were more visible outside of organic discovery…
Outside of the 10K tools (which should suffice for general oversight – you need 15K to do anything about it if there’s a mistake), I’m not aware of any tools for listing these, @Michael.
Why don’t let the user post the answer but wait until the other users with a privilege accept it and only then post it with the others answer.
Right now, you can only unprotect a question you have protected.
Are there any plans to unprotect all for all 15k users? This would be useful when you encounter protection that needs to be removed.