@AncientSwordRage However those same users cannot answer protected questions
> While users with the association bonus but less than 110 reputation aren't allowed to answer protected questions, the checks for automatic protection and whether to allow 15k+ users to protect the question only consider users with <10 rep as "new users", without checking for the association bonus. Also, reputation is loaded live, so answers posted by new users who later earn the required reputation will not count for these checks.
@HellSaint In the past, mods have protected preemptively or in reaction to HNQ status. That was before HNQ underwent an overhaul and we got tool to take questions off HNQ which largely made that use moot.
You have no idea. That was an actual thing we discussed in drafting up that meta. Specifically in the title but also throughout to try to avoid giving people an opportunity to make a condom joke XD
@Medix2 Did that happen in baseball one time? Babe Ruth hit a perfect home run in the second inning and the umpires just closed down the field declaring that a better home run could not be hit? /S
@Rubiksmoose I feel like using that term is just scratching the surface of the pun vein.
@Medix2 hmm that is an odd take. I think it is possible to have a question without a good answer also be attracting problems. But then again part of his point is that protection shouldn't be used for any kind of temporary issue.
> The question already has an accepted answer, that is most likely up-to-date. The question already has a highly upvoted answer, that is most likely up-to-date.
I just really don't think a question being accepted means much... it's one person's opinion compared to having a high score from 50 votes and I'm also constantly told questions are not solely for their askers but also others who come by with the same or similar questions, making accept votes even less meaningful
@Medix2 Yeah there's a lot of debate and disagreement about how the tool should be used, even among SE itself. One of our CMs told me it would be better in their opinion if community members couldn't protect at all.
@Medix2 Agreed. Even some questions with "wrong" accepted answers
But that's the thing, because protection is, according to some POV only supposed to be used for permanent issues with a question so adding timed mode to it would dilute that use XD
@Rubiksmoose Except it's for putting a break on questions that are getting more attention than moderation can keep up with, too. And that use is time limited, but there's no mechanism for helping with unprotecting once that use is passed
In the end, what's important for us is to figure out how we want to use the tool to solve specific issues we see that it can best handle (regardless of the other opinions out there).
@Someone_Evil The Meta post says this: "Questions are usually protected because they have attracted either spam answers or "noisy" answers such as "thank you", "this worked for me", or "I'm also having this problem" from new users who may mistake the site as a traditional forum."
@Rubiksmoose Yeah I keep thinking about that... Every time I read a post on MSE of Stack Overflow or somewhere it's all just based on the experiences that person (or people) have had on whatever sites they frequent
@Rubiksmoose Every time I go to think about what feels like good reasons or guidelines or anything about protecting questions I always find counter-arguments and flaws... :(
I mostly just sit here going "I want more data"... Since I don't think we can really know if something works or not without, well, actually trying it... Would completely removing non-diamond mod protection powers do something useful? I have no idea
I also don't think I see a problem with single users doing most of the protecting and/or unprotecting since it at least happens elsewhere
@GcL Well yeah that's the hard part, since there's the metric of "least harm" but that's hard to calculate. And it requires describing what protecting a question is supposed to do which... people don't agree on.
The metric doesn't have to be good. Just would be good to have so the data to calculate it can be collected so the question it is used to answer can be answered.
@ThomasMarkov I didn't realise this until just now, but the Izzet Engineer background adds glyph of cheese warding to your spell list regardless of class
I don't know that's available about the views. Probably drop anonymous views if possible. Take number of logged in views * proportion of active users below 110 score. Seems like a bit of a hack if it's available, but would count that as the upper limit of the lower bound.
We'll never know how many users come to a protected question only to find that they can't answer it and then proceed to never answer the question; though I'd imagine (can't prove) that this happens less often with questions that are also well-answered
@Someone_Evil which is one reason to let only mods protect it. It's hard for us to know what is that threshold since we can't actually delete anything by ourselves
@HellSaint I think about that all the time now... It's interesting though when even the diamond mods seem to disagree (amongst themselves) whether something is too much work
Context
Following this question, I am looking for ways to heal in the same round after casting Beacon of Hope from a Ring of Spell Storing.
I was looking for an abilty like a Divine Channel or an item I could use to heal but didn't find anything. (and I don't really know where to search besides G...
@Medix2 Different people have different energy and time availability, and different ideas about how much moderator micromanagement a site should require to maintain its quality. The Stack pitches volunteer moderation as "exception handling" but in practice that's... the majority of moderator activities but not by a long shot the only or the most draining.
Shog makes another quite good argument: ""Protected" status does not expire - that should tell you right away that it's meant for the long-term, not temporary bumps in activity."
@Medix2 This is an excellent example of Stack intractability; Shog is arguing that design implies intent and assumes intent implies careful thought and unity of vision and purpose... while it's obvious that the Stack Overlords have a track record of really bad intent and failure to marry intent with purpose, and they could just change the design.
Oh @HellSaint and regarding the HNQ thing and protection discussed earlier. There's alsoa feature request to protect questions with a sudden increase in views
Shog's basically arguing rules intent can be confidently known by analysis of the rules text, without acknowledging that sometimes the rules, as they are written, are just accidentally broken.
Shog might be right about the best use of the protection tool as it's currently formulated, but arguing what it's "meant" for based on its design isn't the most robust support. We Who Are Gathered To Litigate A Manual understand that.
(If he wanted to argue that using protection in response to temporary activity spikes is bad because as written it is harmful, then sure--I'll listen to that. But "meant for"? [citation needed])
There's: a feature request to remove the ability for non-diamonds to protect, a feature request to make protection auto-remove itself over time, a feature request to deny suggested edits from low-reps on protected questions, two feature requests to auto-protect old questions (one request for those with accepted answers one for any old question), a feature request to allow low-reps to request a question be unprotected, and a feature request to raise the 10-rep minimum
I simply cannot imagine all of those getting approved which means people clearly have differing views on the use of protection
@BESW yeah, rules are made by people, and carry all the infelicities that entails :) (there's at least one dangling reference on the US law books that I know of, unless it got quietly fixed in the past few years)
user15026
I strongly suspect this, like many Stack policies and tools, were made for a much smaller network - a lot of the problems stem from "we have sites we didn't expect using tools we didn't expect them to need in ways we didn't expect them to use them and we never actually told them how to do any of it because we thought just letting them decide would be easier"
A lot of Stack did not scale as well as they thought it would, because we kinda...made it for things they didn't think of when it started. I strongly suspect that they never really expected the non-tech sites to take off as well as some of them have.
The Stack Overlords designed a system for a very specific use-case of Q&A about particular kinds of tech questions within their kind of tech community.
user15026
And I don't think they really understand how differently sites approach things, and how giving us room to make our own choices really helped some things but really damaged a lot more than is good.
Now they've opened that system for use with any subject matter that can prove a modicum of interest, and only offer soft policy changes to each smaller ecosystem as a way to make the system work for a new topic and the non-tech community attracted to it.
@Ash To me that would be from not giving enough room, but I could definitely be wrong on that (I don't know this history stuff too too well)
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10:47 PM
And it very quickly kinda totters and falls over. Like you can make a giant golem out of bread dough but it's never going to walk like a person, especially if you don't give it feet.
user15026
(okay sorry that is a silly reference only me might get but shush)
@Medix2 Well, they do have to have some cohesion in look/feel/tooling/expectations if they're going to call it a unified thing
user15026
Like they talk about how you should be able to go from SO to TRPG to Arqade and particpate in all of them right away quick as a wink without any learning but...that's not always the case because of how different sites approach stuff.
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@kviiri Took me a second to follow, then I cracked up
@kviiri I was sitting here trying to figure out how Lunar Excursion Models and ending books early and elm trees and limbs had anything to do with this... It was far, far simpler
Fun tidbit of the day: the Swedish language has the word gå (where å is essentially o) that is a cognate of the English "go" and used to trip me and several classmates over all the time because it means specifically to go by foot
Except it is used, like English "go", in several non-travel situations as well: gå can mean going to a school or similar, things going fine or bad, prices going up... as you can see, meanings shared with English. But when someone uses the word gå to describe concretely going to a place, it's by foot.
@Medix2 Yea, it's just funny that gå is so neatly coupled with the act of walking: when I say eg. "the prices are going up" in Swedish I kinda imagine them actually walking x)
In Finland, we call the Swedish spoken in Sweden "Rikssvenska" or "King's Swedish", while one of the nicknames they have for our Swedish is "Muminsvenska" or "Moomin Swedish"
because the Moomin TV show was originally dubbed into Swedish in Finland (fittingly, Tove Jansson's native language was Muminsvenska!)
@BESW alright here you go! I enjoyed it a lot, though Grim left about halfway through because family showed up and was loudly distracting. It made me feel a lot more connected to my neighborhood and I think it was really calming
@Carcer Swedish is an official second language so it's an obligatory subject at schools, which means most people know at least a bit of it and many resent the language due to having had it forced upon them
But yeah, Swedish does sound a bit trollish
Finnish, if you're not careful you'll slip into Elvish
People interested in designing games: there was a free virtual panel from San Diego Comic Con about game design, called “Get It On The Table: Designing Your Tabletop Game“ (search on youtube?). It went live an hour ago and should still be available. I watched it and it had a bunch of good advice which I want to try. Just thought I’d put it out here for others’ enjoyment
There are tweets saying you shouldn't use the "highest failing number" and instead should use "lowest successful number" hmmmmm but the OP said that wouldn't work
I actually have a board game that consistently expresses thresholds for numeric values as upper bounds on non-qualification instead of lower bounds of qualification and it bugs me a fair bit
OTOH, note this: English has a single word for a value being greater than another, but no similarly intuitive single word for a value being greater to or equal to another
@kviiri I can't say that five exceeds four. Though "the number of cats exceeds the number of dogs" works but I'd sooner say "[...] is greater than [...]"
Eg. Cuba Libre (the board game I was referring to above) uses the "A exceeds B" wording a fair bit and I wonder if the extra brewity is the reason for choosing to express conditions as upper instead of lower bounds