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Going forward in our discussions, I think this means that I would recommend us not putting major focus on increasing our coverage of spam questions since our current usage of this seems to be sufficient at keeping spam low.

Going forward in our discussions, I think this means that I would recommend us not putting major focus on increasing our coverage of spam questions since our current usage of this seems to be sufficient at keeping spam low.

Spam prevention doesn't seem to be the main use for protection (volume-wise)

Unprotecting questions is rare (but it shouldn't be)

Protections are carried out by only a handful of users

But I bring it up because I think it shows how little transparency there is around this whole mechanic. The vast majority of users never even interact with it at all (except an unknowable number of 1-rep users and spammers who get blocked from answering).

Spam prevention doesn't seem to be the main use for protection (volume-wise)

Going forward in our discussions, I think this means that I would recommend us not putting major focus on increasing our coverage of spam questions since our current usage of this seems to be sufficient at keeping spam low.

Unprotecting questions is rare (but it shouldn't be)

Going forward, given the low rate of unprotection I think we should make a major point to try to figure out as a site how we can minimize questions getting and staying protected when they do not need to be.

Protections are carried out by only a handful of users

But I bring it up because I think it shows how little transparency there is around this whole mechanic. The vast majority of users never even interact with it at all (except an unknowable number of 1-rep users and spammers who get blocked from answering).

I think this means that most of the community has not interacted with this tool and also likely doesn't have a full understanding how and when and when not to use. Setting up some community guidelines to further understand and align the community's use of this tool would therefore be beneficial.

This just goes to show that there is a pretty dire lack of transparency around this whole mechanic and that the vast majority of users never even interact with it at all (except an unknowable number of 1-rep users and spammers who get blocked from answering).

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with that user doing the protections. And there is a clear difference between the two cases because this user did these protections over the course of years as opposed to the unprotections which were done over the course of a couple hours.

But I bring it up because I think it shows how little transparency there is around this whole mechanic. The vast majority of users never even interact with it at all (except an unknowable number of 1-rep users and spammers who get blocked from answering).