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I just did my fourth fifth(? stopped counting...) review on an answer to the question

You are an advanced AI that controls a smart house. How do you kill your master?

As it stands now, the question has

  • a total of 29 30 answers,
  • 17 18 answers with score <= 3,
  • five six of those with zero score and (partly) below, and
  • About a third of the answers (9 10) are posted by users with <200 reputation.

In light of the recent discussion about what-if type of questions; this question especially caught my eye, as it keeps attracting more and more answers by new users with questionable quality. I do not intend to start the same discussion within this question, but what I do look for is a way to protect this post from more mid-to-low-quality postings, as I feel like the total quality of the question seems to suffer under the increasing amount of answers, and I wonder if we could (should?) do something about it.

It has already been discussed that those questions are somehow off-topic for being idea generation. So, for this specific question, should we close it? Protect it? Not to punish the author of a well-recieved question, but to prevent it from getting heavily overloaded.

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    $\begingroup$ I just went to look and Monica's already protected it. Protection is there to handle exactly this scenario :) For the bigger on/off topic discussion...that needs discussion :) $\endgroup$
    – Tim B
    Feb 5, 2016 at 14:04
  • $\begingroup$ I try to alert moderators of questions that I think need protection, either with flags or in chat. They can't be everywhere at once and most of them will protect anything that I can show has at least two 1Rep's answers. $\endgroup$
    – Mazura
    Feb 18, 2016 at 5:11

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I've gone ahead and protected it (thanks for the alert). This can be easily reversed if we decide later that it's unneeded.

Protection is usually warranted when a question attracts several poor-quality answers from new users. In fact, a question is automatically protected if three answers from new users are deleted. In this case none of the answers you're talking about are deleted (and many are at 0 rather than downvoted), so while protecting the question helps reduce future answers, the community still needs to address the current answers. Please (everybody, not just OP) look them over, leave helpful comments, flag low-quality or non-answers for review, vote, and so on. Please remember that these answers might have been those users' first encounter with our site, so guide them where you can. Helpful tip: in a comment, "[tour]" is a shorthand for the tour page and "[edit]" is an edit link for that post.

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  • $\begingroup$ I did not want to imply that every answer was bad. In fact, some of the answers I reviewed seemed totally fine. I just wasn't sure about wether such a load of answers serves any purpose as I doubt anyone reads every single one of them. $\endgroup$
    – T3 H40
    Feb 5, 2016 at 14:09
  • $\begingroup$ Right, I'm not trying to say every 0-score answer is bad, either. I haven't even read them all! I'm just asking people to take a look, vote (up or down!) as appropriate, leave helpful comments, flag the ones that shouldn't be there, etc. Let's review the answers on this question. $\endgroup$
    – Monica Cellio
    Feb 5, 2016 at 14:21
  • $\begingroup$ Alright! Let's do this! :) $\endgroup$
    – T3 H40
    Feb 5, 2016 at 14:23

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