I noticed today that a request for protection came up due to the the large number of me-too answers on a trending question I answered recently.  This got me thinking, since trending questions get far more attention than the average question, should questions that trend be automatically protected?  On the upside, this does seem to be a common problem and the auto-protection could be put in place only while the question is trending.  On the downside, it would make it more difficult for new people to participate in answering a trending (highly visible) question so it could be a barrier to entry.  Thoughts?
122858
Expanding the criteria for auto-protection has been discussed in the past:  But I think that discussion addresses the wrong problem:  Protecting a question with a large number of answers doesn't do anything to fix the problems caused by having a large number of answers. In most cases, the question should still be either cleaned up or closed.  Large numbers of answers does not necessarily indicate a honeypot for misguided newbies. While a fair number of these do fall into  territory, that's not universally true - and blocking outsiders from answering a question just because a lot of &quot;insiders&quot; have already gotten to it doesn't solve anything.  The occasional drive-by answer on an old, answered question isn't that much of a problem and we have existing tools for identifying and handling them.   Generally,  are sufficient for perpetually-popular posts. However, there is a scenario that isn't addressed by them: a question that sees a sudden, extreme increase in popularity and as a result attracts a large number of non-answers that must then be deleted. The classic case is a post that rises to the top of Reddit for a while, although we've seen similar effects from other sources (and even generated internally from links on our own Hot List or meta posts). Let me be clear: these 15 minutes of fame aren't inherently bad: a good question that attracts a lot of attention can also attract some really great answers. But there's always that temptation to just participate even when you've nothing of value to contribute - and moderating a sudden influx of such answers can be troublesome, particularly on smaller sites:  If no moderator is around, it falls on trusted members of the community to remove non-answers. We're working on distributing the load here, but this will still be labor-intensive on smaller sites.  When your first experience on a site is having your post deleted, it doesn't exactly endear you to the community there. Yes, you may well have Learned A Valuable Lesson from it, but we could be a bit more gentle about teaching that.  The communities on these sites, knowing full-well how troublesome such answers can be, may try to  questions that start to garner a lot of attention - potentially locking out good answers on questions that wouldn't actually be problematic if left to themselves.   That last one in particular concerns me. I think most users use their privilege responsibly, but the notion that &quot;hot&quot; questions need preemptive protection has proved stronger than common sense here - and I don't think we should fight it. Instead, let's... Expand the existing heuristics to protect questions that are demonstrating problematic tendencies, but haven't yet been proven problematic As explained in the title, this means protecting questions that've gotten more than N answers (deleted or otherwise) in a 24-hour period from users who've earned less than 10 reputation on the site (excluding any association bonuses). This would be a check made when the answer is posted - so if N is 3, the third answer from a new user would block further answers. On most sites, N can be fairly large - a threshold of 5 would protect questions like these on Stack Overflow:     On certain sites, we might want to set the threshold significantly lower. A threshold of 4 would protect questions like these on The Workplace:           Coupled with this change, I think it also makes sense to expand the  to allow users to unprotect questions that were automatically protected, thus allowing them to override the system if it becomes overzealous. Related:
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Is there a way to subscribe to a question and be notified more frequently than once a day?  I'd like to be notified immediately on any posts to a question.
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I wrote a question about blocking certain characters in passwords. It became tremendously unpopular, and it seemed like everyone wanted to rain on my parade every day.  Eventually, I "got it," agreed completely with what people were saying to me, and just wanted to withdraw my question so that my reputation didn't slide even further downhill.  Unfortunately, the system is designed such that I can't withdraw my question or redeem myself. Instead, I just get daily reputation attacks. That's a terrible system, and it needs to be changed.
77008
Questions are occasionally protected when they start attracting unwanted input -- because the question was on the Hot Network Questions list, because it hit Reddit, because it's about a hot-button topic that everybody wants to weigh in on... Protection allows a community to prevent some stuff that they would otherwise have to clean up later on a small number of volatile questions.  Currently you need 10 reputation earned on the local site to answer a protected question.  This proposal is to broaden the restriction to include comments.  Currently, anybody with 50 reputation can comment, so people with the association bonus but no local reputation can't answer but can comment.  That's kind of backwards; answers are first-class citizens, the stuff we want, and comments are meant to be disposable.  So if people in this group can't even answer, it's counter-intuitive that they should be able to comment.  This restriction should apply to comments on the question itself and on answers.  Further, questions that have gotten the kind of attention that leads to protection tend to attract more comments, sometimes .  For all practical purposes only moderators can remove comments or relocate them to chat; the community doesn't have the tools to do this effectively.  Note that this dovetails nicely with the general encouragement to take comment discussions to chat -- users with an association bonus can use chat, so this is a little more incentive to go there to discuss the question.  Perhaps the protection notice could even include a link to the site's main chat room.  Participants aren't turned away but redirected.  Most questions are not protected; people can participate normally on the vast majority of the questions on a site.  Protection is an exception, but when it's needed, there's usually a lot of action -- and in my experience on several sites, comments tend to be part of the problem.  The number of valuable comments that would be lost -- that is, requests for clarification or suggested improvements that nobody in the local community can offer -- seems small.  The number of...other...types of comments is much higher.
7594
Since I've a database systems examination in less than 3 hours (from now), I have been browsing Stack Exchange network for questions with normalisation and related tags. Most of the questions are now closed as  or others from the list.  Since, these questions are closed, no users are allowed to post answers to them (unless they are reopened). Why am I, then, allowed the option to protect such questions? Doesn't that beat the entire purpose behind "protecting" a question?
57143
Part of my daily routine is to go to stackexchange.com and see the hot questions. Today this hot question was up:    The question itself seemed like it might be a problem but my curiosity got the better of me, and I was not expecting to see quite so much graphic detail about the nature of the abuse -- to the extent that it ended up giving me a panic attack.  I feel like this question (especially in detail) is likely to cause a lot of emotional grief for a lot of people, and it would be beneficial if it could be flagged with a content warning and, ideally, if questions like those would not show up on the "hot questions" list.  The question itself is legitimate and I am glad the user asked the question -- and the answers they received are, also, quite beneficial. But it certainly isn't the sort of thing I was hoping to be confronted with, especially as a "hot question."  Thus, what I am proposing:   Have the ability for the community to flag such comments with a content warning Prevent such posts from appearing on the "hot network questions" display and sidebars.   Edit: It appears that the question has since been deleted. I have mixed feelings about this (the answers which were given would have been very educational for the person asking). Regardless, I still feel like a content-warning mechanism would be helpful; sometimes there are questions that are important and valid but which are also troublesome for some people to see.  The use of CW-based partial-hiding is well-established in communities such as Mastodon, where people can put things behind a structured spoiler/CW tag that indicates what lies behind it.
111335
Most (if not all) SE sites have something in their help centre along these lines:     You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.   My question is: Is the emphasis on it being a "problem you face" to discourage     Chatty, open-ended questions [that] diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.     or does it actually have to be your own question? (Let's assume it otherwise fits the criteria for being a good question.)  It's also followed up by this paragraph     If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. However, if your motivation is “I would like others to explain ______ to me”, then you are probably OK. (Discussions are of course welcome in our real time web chat.)   which (combined with the contrast to "chatty, open-ended questions" above) makes me feel that as long as you describe a practical, answerable question that could be a problem that you face (but in real life happens to not be), you are okay; however the letter of the rule indicates that it should be your own problem.  The main reason that I am asking is that in beta I feel like it is a good policy to ask high-quality example questions, in order to:   help define the scope of the site attract new visitors who are interested by the question and/or its answers build up a bank of good, high-quality questions in the early stages help the site show up on Google question results and drive more traffic   However, I want to know if it's discouraged from doing so.  Edit. Let's give an example to make it clearer.   I'm on Pets.SE at the moment. Here are some questions from the front page.   How can I stop my dogs from barking at animals on television? Will crickets lay barren eggs? What are the arguments against neutering a guinea pig?   If those questions didn't apply to you or a problem you faced, could you still ask them? Or does the fact that they are not an "actual problem you face" mean that it doesn't matter that it's otherwise a "practical, answerable question"?
73781
This feature request is a response to  Two days ago,  suggested that we . However, given that  (hat tip ) as well as ...  262  103   ... I suggest that we take it a step further. Let's extend the heuristics for detecting—and blocking—low-quality questions to enforce unique titles, or at least flag new questions with duplicate titles automatically. We can leave the precise heuristics of detecting a duplicate title up to the Stack Overflow development team. I have no delusions about the fact that a few questions will &quot;slip through the cracks.&quot; The goal here is to be proactive about minimizing the number of duplicates, and I think that the best place to start is the existing heuristics for detecting low-quality questions. After all, duplicate question titles are bad for a number of reasons: They often indicate a question that is itself a duplicate, but perhaps just as importantly, they decrease the signal-to-noise ratio when searching for questions. I honestly can't think of any reason that duplicate question titles are helpful, unless you are asking for a solution to the same problem in a different programming language. Even then, I think that it would be acceptable to rephrase the question to say &quot;How do I do X in (insert programming language here)?&quot;  makes a good point about the potential problems with this solution:  I have a hunch that if we do that, people will find ways to circumvent it (changing case or punctuation, adding random spam), and we'll end up stuck in a an arms race.  We may get stuck in an arms race with some users, but I honestly think that many people new to Stack Overflow just don't understand the etiquette of asking questions here. If we could even convince people to rephrase their question more clearly 20% of the time, I think that it would be a tremendous boon to the community. Furthermore, remember that heuristics for low-quality questions already exist, arms race or no.
97849
It happened to me that I found a solution to an older question. This question was commented by many people with comments like "very interesting, important, ..." such that I thought that my answer has also some value. My answer was the only one. It was upvoted and accepted by the asker. However, I assume, that very few of the "commentators" saw my answer, because the system does not inform automatically about new answers.   I think it would have been helpful for me and the commentators when they would get informed. I could achieve this by adding my own comment to their comments, because this triggers a system message. My question is: would this action be considered admissible or not? Are there some other possibilities?
58767
I notice a really worrying trend of some really popular questions being closed and eventually deleted. Some of them became legends already, like this one  ? Yes, it does not fit the format ideally, but what is point of obeying the letter of the law to such extent that it becomes ridiculous? Ok, closing is fine if community leaders became so pedantic, but why go so far as to even delete it? At this point it looks like burning old pictures just because you don't like them.  Update: Summary  For now I heard only two clear arguments:   Those questions pollute search results.  Those questions don't play well with enforcing question and answer standards.   Both of that statements are easily verifiable and to my experience are just false.
76760
The wording on the  privilege page is confusing and would benefit from being clarified. See these questions on  and . Suggested wording from  is to replace this:  Which questions can be protected? Any question, even a deleted question, can be protected and unprotected, subject to the following restrictions:  The question must be at least a day old A user can unprotect any protected question   with the following:  Which questions can be protected? Any question at least a day old, even a deleted question, can be protected and unprotected. A user with the privilege can unprotect any protected question.
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For 15K users protect option is supposed to work :     the question must have at least one answer by a new user aka a user with &lt; 10 rep on the site (which is the required rep limit to answer protected questions)    made me wonder if there is a off-by-one error in calculation somewhere. At the moment of writing  its author has only 9 rep on site (6 from one answer and 3 from one question) but protection link isn't displayed to 15K users.  I additionally checked that question is more than a day old:  this is enough for protect option to become available.
13448
I have noticed that questions are sometimes protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. In order to answer those questions, you must have earned more than 10 reputation on the site.  But what if a new user has managed to gain more than 10 reputation in a single day, and then tried to post this kind of answer?  Shouldn't we make the rep requirement for answering protected questions even higher? Say 50 rep?
103337
TL;DR:  I believe there are still some issues with self-answers, particularly near-immediate self-answers, which are not addressed by the current system.  This could be remedied by imposing an automated restriction on how soon self-answers will be displayed in the thread.  Allow users to submit self-answers at any time, but do not display them until certain reasonable conditions (a relatively short timeout, or the posting of a competing answer) are met.    History  This thread covers a good deal of the concerns surrounding self-answers, and some mechanisms in place to prevent "bad" self-answers from new users and other abuse of the self-answer system.    As I understand it, the following restrictions apply:   Users with &lt;100 rep cannot self-answer within 8 hours of posting a question. Self-answers cannot be accepted within 48 hours of posting. Self-answers do not provide rep from being accepted. Accepted self-answers are not pinned to the top of the thread.   Problem  This does a good job of preventing users from posting answers which should probably be comments (or not posted at all), allows superior answers to rise above accepted self-answers, and prevents some other abuses of the system.  However, there is a less tangible element of self-answers which this does not address:    Self answers are a disincentive to other users who may otherwise be willing to post more accurate, detailed material stemming from broader or deeper knowledge and/or experience than the asker has.  When someone posts an answer to their own question, it presumably means that the problem which spawned the question is solved to their satisfaction.  This is fine for the purposes of sharing information with the community, but it deters others from providing solutions to the question which may be more complete or accurate since there is not so much likelihood that the self-answerer will accept a competing answer.  Worse, in the case of near-immediate self-answers, this can remove the incentive for other users to gain reputation via up-votes because the asker has an unfair head-start.  Unless everyone is required to view new answers to questions where they have already voted on an answer, most people probably vote on a good answer and never look at the question again.  This can put (potentially) better answers at a disadvantage even when the head-start is within an hour.  Suggested Solution  Add a delay to the posting of self-answers.  The delay should be the least of these:   Until a competing answer has been posted. A reasonable amount of time to allow competing answerers a chance to post, without preventing self-answers outright.  (Suggestion: 2 hours)   To better facilitate this, and avoid completely turning people off from appropriate self-answering, I suggest the delay be handled through automation more than user limitation.  That is, the user should be allowed to submit the self-answer at any time.  But the answer will not actually be displayed to other users until one of the above conditions have been met.  This could also be applied to the existing 8-hour delay for low-rep users.  Example:  T:0 - A user finishes resolving a tough problem, just before he would have gone to SE for assistance, and decides to share his new-found knowledge with the community.  He posts a question describing his problem.  T:5 minutes - The user then posts a self-answer.  There has not yet been another answer posted to the thread.  The user is given a notice describing the restrictions in place regarding self-answers, and the answer is submitted into the database but not displayed to other users.  (Similar to how suggested edits are only displayed to the user suggesting them, until they are approved.)  T:1 hour, 15 minutes - Another user sees the unanswered question, and posts their answer.  Their answer is displayed immediately, and the self-answer is now also displayed.  T:2 hours - Had the second answer not been posted, the self-answer would automatically be displayed after this point.
108415
About a month ago, we rolled out a new feature: . So far, the reception has been mostly positive, and I've definitely seen    posted in this form. But I've also seen something else, a side-effect you may have seen discussed here on MSO:     Ignore for a moment the specific details of the Q&amp;A pairs discussed in those two posts, and note the following: three poorly-asked questions, questions that ordinarily would have been closed, down-voted, and/or edited... But instead sparked a small outrage among the members who came across them. Now, we've known for years that self-answered questions can be problematic. Asking is hard. Answering is hard. Asking a question when you already know the answer can be even harder to do well. But that is - or rather, that should be - beside the point: plenty of people ask really terrible questions without bothering to answer them, and we've certainly managed to handle them over the years. If normal community-moderation is failing when it comes to self-answered questions, that's a problem. These are edge-cases at the moment. But if we're trying to encourage more use of this form to share knowledge on Stack Exchange (), it's something that needs to be faced. I'm presenting one possible solution below (in true gratuitous self-answer fashion), but what do you think? Would some other option work better? Is this even a real problem?
32794
I was wondering what might be making my questions less attractive to users?  I get very low views most of the time. What should be done to increase a question's popularity?
117115
Given:   We are getting lots of problems with the quality of questions from new users. The unwillingness to register shows a lack of commitment to the site and hence is a good indication that the person will not spend the time learning how to post good questions. We are getting a lot more questions than we need, it could be claimed that Stack Overflow is becoming less useful due to the volume of questions.   Should unregistered users only be allowed to answer questions and not post questions?  In the old days Stack Overflow benefited from lots of questions being asked, so it made sense to make it easy for anyone to ask questions,  I no longer see the bandit from increasing the already great volume of questions.  (The site I use other the Stack Overflow, don’t seem to be getter the same problems with the volume of poor questions.)    The way I think of it is when a nation is first formed, anyone including convicts are let in, but once something worthwhile has been built, a system is put in place to only allow in people that are a net benefit to the current residence.   I am now thinking that a lot of the new unregister users that are asking questions will never become a net benefit to the current committed users.