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I've earned the Protect a question privilege, and it seems that this question would be a good candidate for it, with 14 answers already (and the opinion based nature of the question as shown by the responses we're getting). However, I don't see Protect as an option anywhere.

I thought it was listed below the post with the other actions like Share, Edit, etc, but it's not there.

Has my coffee just not kicked in yet this morning?

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  • The big reason that one was getting so many answers was because SE decided to share it as a hot network question in the side-bar on other sites. Mods can still protect the question and also remove it from the hot network question queue. We also get automated flags when a question suddenly gets 10+ answers.
    – BMitch Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 12:31
  • Which, @BMitch, is kinda what the Protect option is all about, right?
    – FreeMan
    Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 12:34
  • It's two tiers, one to remove it from the list reduces the exposure and hopefully stops the flood of new people trying to answer, and the other to protect it blocks new people from answering even if they didn't find it from the hot network question list. Depending on the scenario, I may only remove it from the host network question list.
    – BMitch Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 12:40

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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You're right, it does show up below the question with the other links:

Screenshot of a question with the Protect option below the question, after "Flag"

But it's not always available. As described by Taryn here:

the question must have at least one answer by a new user aka a user with < 10 rep on the site (which is the required rep limit to answer protected questions).

If the question does not have an answer meeting this requirement, then the protect option will not be available. This should minimize some of the protecting of questions that do not need it.

The theory is that questions should only be protected when there's evidence that they need it due to low-quality answers from users that would be stopped by the feature.

A quick scroll through the answers on that question confirms that none of them were posted by users who would have been affected by that restriction would currently be affected by that restriction. Of course, as a user who would be affected by that restriction, I don't have enough reputation to confirm that there aren't any deleted answers. But since you're not seeing the option, I assume there aren't.

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  • Ah. Unfortunately, there are many answers from people, like yourself, who have a reputation <110, which means they're new to the stack, but not SE as a whole. Since each community has different standards, these new answers don't always make sense.
    – FreeMan
    Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 11:59
  • @FreeMan You're right, I seem to have looked too quickly...this answer would have been blocked. I assume the upvote on it caused the system to consider it to not count, since the user is now no longer subject to the restrictions...arguably, that could be considered a bug.
    – Ryan M
    Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 12:02

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