Conversation started Apr 13, 2014 at 5:22.
gnat
gnat
Apr 13, 2014 05:22
@Shog9 we started protecting questions featured at Ars Technica about half year ago, after we discovered that these get polluted with low quality content. If you think we were doing it wrong, I would like to understand why and what we should have been doing instead
Shog9
Shog9
@gnat Protect when there's a problem, not when one is anticipated.
gnat
gnat
@Shog9 there is a problem, as I said we started protecting after we tested that unprotected featured questions are polluted. Here is a proof by the way, just in that recently featured question:
-1
A: Why should passwords be encrypted if they are being stored in a secure database?

lobatiI think there's a fundamental flaw in the question. The fact is, there's no such thing as a "secure database". It should be taken as a given that there are flaws in your system somewhere that could allow malicious users access to arbitrary data on your servers. Heartbleed is an excellent case in ...

@MichaelT auto-protect has been already tested at Workplace and at Programmers. So far so good
Shog9
Shog9
@gnat Look, I have a huge backlog of stuff to get through yet tonight - I'm not gonna re-hash this same "all questions are equal, all attention is bad" argument again. Protect isn't magic pixie dust that makes all the bad things go away; it's intended for one specific purpose - please reserve it for that.
gnat
gnat
Apr 13, 2014 05:43
@Shog9 all right I will open meta discussion to re-evaluate approach we were successfully using for half year before you noticed. Meanwhile I protected that particular question back, following guidance given by Jeff: "attracting a lot of drive-by noise answers" - per my reading 5 of 15 answers are like that
Blog - Stack Exchange: New Protected Question Status
Jeff Atwood on June 06, 2010

At the behest of the Super User moderators, we’ve instituted a new question status of protected. A protected question is like a protected wikipedia article — it no longer allows additions by anonymous users.

Protected questions are indicated in the standard question footer like so:

This question is protected to prevent “thanks”, “me too!”, and spam posts from new users. To answer it, you must have more than 10 reputation.

We needed this because some of the more popular Super User questions attracted a lot of noise from random drive-by users who didn’t und …

 
Conversation ended Apr 13, 2014 at 5:43.