Found one

That was really easy to source. You didn't try hard enough :P

Weird that the association bonus circumvents that

@Medix2 it shows you're trusted across multiple stacks... Makes sense to me.

swings he protection hammer 15009 points!

@Medix2 Circumvents what?

@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.

@Medix2 Mighty foul answer from a network users that has to come in for the question to warrant protection because of that alone

@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.

@Someone_Evil Oh yeah for sure, it was just kinda weird to me

@Rubiksmoose And questions didn't stay on the HNQ for that long, which was also a change IIRC

uh... shouldn't we have much more questions protected again? We are down to 7...

They currently don't stay on for long. They used to be able to stay on for a long time!

@Rubiksmoose I just keep finding myself reading this post

@Trish Nothing has been reversed yet.

@Medix2 As usual Shog eloquently states very good points. I agree with that FWIW. I don't think protection should be used preemptively.

ahhh

Yeah so 7 sounds about right lol

@Rubiksmoose You're lucky were not in Not a Bar. So many prophylaxis jokes to be had!

@Rubiksmoose I just hadn't heard "protection is for well-answered questions" before

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.

@Rubiksmoose Maybe we should have just leaned into it? Should have made it get attention at least

@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.

I feel like attracting people to meta is like organizing tours to Mos Eisley

@Someone_Evil True :D I guess that is why we are mods and not marketing gurus!

@Rubiksmoose Yeah I've found a lot of takes and opinions on protection across the Metas...

@Medix2 @HellSaint touched upon in their answer:

@Someone_Evil Yeah I know

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

Yeah, but the point of "unlikely to need new answers or updates" is relevant

@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

There is a feature req. for a protection type that expires after X time, isn't there?

@Rubiksmoose I link to that feature-request a lot nowadays I think this is the 9th time?

@Someone_Evil Yup, an old one.

@Medix2 Yeah... accepted answers stack wide are essentially "the answer the OP liked that worked for them at the time."

@Someone_Evil Yeah I have it saved in my web browser bookmarks and a document on stuff. It's here

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

bleh.

Doing stuff some of the way old accepted answers did could get you meowed these days.

@Rubiksmoose Just keep circle of protection and add a shield of faith that expires.

@Medix2 ahh so not that trusted

@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

@Someone_Evil Not according to some. That's kind of what I'm getting at.

Ask 5 people what protection is for and you get 11 different answers.

@Rubiksmoose IIRC that's the use the privilege article most clearly explains

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).

But, yeah. It's gonna be interesting to try to get some kind of consensus on this

@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."

@Medix2 Mods can and absolutely have. But you're right that it's uncommon.

> Questions should be protected when they are attracting poor answers from new users that exceed the volume which can be moderated in a timely manner.

@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

From the privilege article

> Questions should be unprotected when they are no longer attracting large amounts of traffic or would benefit from new answers.

Just saying that practices being somewhere doesn't mean they happen, are followed, or are good practices

@GcL when you say "meta" there, you mean MSO, right? =)

Which is kinda what that whole featured Meta post is for as I understand

Indeed it is.

@nitsua60 Would it make you feel better if I replied, "yes" ?

Hopefully I'll have some time to put some of my thoughts into words, but I certainly am struggling with some parts.

@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... :(

Sounds easier than putting words into your thoughts.

@Medix2 Like everything else, pick your poison?

@GcL But why pick one immediately when I can develop an immunity to both over time and make the choice meaningless?

@Medix2 How much iocaine powder have you been ingesting?!

@Medix2 Same. Or start to get too over complicated or over simplified.

@Rubiksmoose Over Simplicated

XD

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

Are there specific questions you want answered? It's good to have those written down somewhere before collecting data.

@GcL I was a little joking, but I also don't think our meta is a hive of scum and villainy.

@GcL Most of them are "Does X implementation/method/procedure/practice of protecting questions work?" so uh... not really any data

@Medix2 I like that. That's sounds like a solid start. What does it mean to "work?", or at least, by what metric can "working" be measured?

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 like glyph of cheese as an official alias for that spell.

@Medix2 And much of the harm comes from literally unknowable numbers

@GcL It's more accurate considering many spells you can put into it aren't doing any sort of warding

@Rubiksmoose Yup :(

@Rubiksmoose Might be able to approximate it, or at least bound it. Number of views comes to mind as an upper bound.

@GcL That's a good point. Hard to set a useful bottom bound though...

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.

I think all we get are "views" with no granularity.

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

Indeed we'll just have to accept to some degree that will never be known.

Coming with somebody else's homebrew... I don't know if I've seen that yet

I think I've seen that at most a couple of times. Keeps things... interesting... eh?

@Rubiksmoose I just had left a comment of the usual stuff I like homebrew-review to have and then realized almost all of it doesn't exist XD

@BardicWizard Cool, I look forward to hearing your thoughts about it.

@BESW may I also play? If it's intended for play while walking I should be able to play at some point soon

I could use more feedback!

Just the one test by Nits has dramatically shifted my understanding of what I've written, already.

No, I can't even submit to the Folklore Jam until the first of the month.

(I didn't start writing WWG as a jam submission, but then Jam happened.)

@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

@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."

@HellSaint Meanwhile there are feature requests to make it expire

@BESW Yeah there's the big unknown of what being a diamond mod is really like... I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I've never thought about or heard of

@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 also a 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])

@BESW and ironically being contradicted somewhat by the official guidance a bit.

We Who Are Gathered To Litigate A Manual are also very familiar with the text and the creators being at odds.

That sounds not at all familiar

Really? No D&D author has ever tweeted direct contradictions of the published text in a semi-official capacity as a rules authority?

@Rubiksmoose I now have a list of the feature requests that, viewed together, make me go "something is wrong"

I would be highly interested in such a list

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)

@Ash 14/10 would scream again.

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.

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)

if it can't move, it's just a lem

@kviiri This is one of those rare times where the internet did not help at all with understanding a word. What is "lem"?

@Medix2 It's a golem that doesn't go

@Ash I understood that reference.gif

@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.

@kviiri Cross-linguistically it's common for "to go" to expand its meaning to non-physical uses (or at least less concrete ones)

And for traveling on something else, it's åka

@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)

It's weird how almost everything I know about the Swedish language is vowels, stress, and photactics with fun words like västkustskt

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!)

"King's Swedish" sounds familiar

we speak the Queen's English over here

@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 Aye x)

I really like how Swedish sounds, I kinda understand the antipathy many have towards studying it but it's a cool language

@kviiri the only thing I know about what Finns think about Swedish is that Finntroll sing in Swedish because it allegedly sounds more "trollish"

@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

TIL the "score:0" search looks only for posts with exactly 0 score

Bad Quail Games asks (twitter link) What's the better word for "the number a roll has to beat (be higher than) to count as a success"?

@BESW I feel like I'd just say "minimum number"

Though that... hmm that makes a problem with it not being the actual minimum number...

@BESW success threshold?

My experience points towards people not being very good with "minimum" and "maximum"

Yeah and for me "target number" implies wanting an exact result not a specific result or higher

Or "least", "most" etc. in similar situations

Maybe I'd just end up using "number to beat"... though what happens when you tie would be unclear

I’m using success threshold in a (as-yet-unnamed) game I’m writing, because the setting is about 80% Star Trek and so I just liked the abbreviation ST

I think "challenge" is kinda good because you have to beat the challenge

While "target number" sounds like being spot on should be enough

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

Eh. I guess they missed the point

@Medix2 really? That’s how I usually interpret a stated difficulty

@BardicWizard There's probably some amount of theory on not making people do +1 addition if you don't have to

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

Or maybe somehow there's been an empirical study on "ties have the player win" vs "ties have the player lose" vs "other methods of resolving ties"...

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 Do you mean "above" and "at least"? I guess there's the strange "not below"

@Medix2 I mean "exceed"

@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

@kviiri TIL "deceed" is used at least somewhere as the antonym of exceed

@Medix2 I occasionally use "derstand" as an antonym of "understand" just to confuse people

@kviiri I'm partial to "overstand"

I occasionally am whelmed

Now I shall head to bed