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Protected questions are like locked questions, except that users with sufficient reputation are still able to interact with them. Automatic question protection can be enabled or disabled on a per-site basis.

Should we disable automatic question protection?

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    $\begingroup$ Does this actually happen regularly? I've never noticed that. $\endgroup$
    – Maeher
    Feb 4, 2023 at 8:57
  • $\begingroup$ @Maeher It happens from time to time. It's not extremely common, but it's a pain going through and manually unprotecting questions which should never have been protected in the first place. $\endgroup$
    – forest
    Feb 4, 2023 at 9:24

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I propose we disable automatic question protection. Moderators will still be able to manually protect questions as needed, but the system will not automatically lock questions anymore.

Many good answers on our site are drive-by answers written by cryptography experts who have very low rep and may not be able to answer protected questions. We are not a large and high-volume site like Stack Overflow and we do not need assistance to reduce our spam-handling workload (which is already very low). It is likely that automatic question protection causes more harm than it prevents.

This change can always be reverted if necessary.

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    $\begingroup$ As this has remained the most upvoted (and only) answer for almost two weeks, I'm going to mark it as accepted and get the process started. $\endgroup$
    – forest
    Feb 14, 2023 at 0:34
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I took a look, and after reviewing the request and some of the numbers on the site, I did increase the threshold from 5 to 6 for automatic question protection. This should ensure that it virtually never happens, barring something unusual.

In addition, for this particular setting, it's not possible to disable it entirely; we can only adjust the threshold before it triggers.

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