We should have a question status similar to locking that non mods can set on posts

Question

If this is tl;dr skip to the bottom heading.

In the SO Close Vote Reviewers chatroom, there was recently a discussion with @Shog9, @JonClements and a few others about this Stack Overflow question:

• Where can I download Spring Framework jars without using Maven?

This question is very simply a request for an off site resource... with a score of 75.

In the ensuing conversation, there was quite a lot of discussion about the "off site resource" close reason for questions like that one and this Super User question and this Stack Overflow question.

These questions are clearly off topic and violate the letter of the site guidelines, but they have a lot of views and aren't really causing harm... well, except for all unnecessary answers they tend to attract. For instance, the first bulleted question has 8 deleted answers.

At one point, @Shog9 said:

The rules, the guidelines, the close reasons... All exist to make life easier for folks here. If we treat them as sacrosanct and immutable, unable to be interpreted or applied differently in different situations... then they stop serving and start being worshiped.
@Deduplicator says it should be protected (which it was based on the answer deletions); perhaps more
I could see a wiki-lock being useful at this point in time
I don't see the need to delete it though.
And when you close a question, that's what you're saying.

The thing is, though, questions like this one don't cleanly fall into the historical lock guidelines:

###When is it appropriate to lock a question for historical reasons?

Questions can be historically locked when:

1. The post is Off-Topic or Not Constructive, and
2. The post is stellar, in spite of its off-topic nature, and
3. There are a large number of views, upvotes and inbound links on the post, and
4. The post is contentious; i.e. it has been closed and reopened at least once, or deleted and undeleted at least once

There are questions that are:

1. Yes off topic but aren't harming anyone
2. Not particularly stellar, but many have found useful
3. Have a large number of views, but perhaps just high SEO and not really inbound links
4. Only contentious among white-hats that want to follow the rules in a sacrosanct and immutable way

Moderators (on Stack Overflow, anyway) also don't seem very willing to apply historical locks in their current form. These flags also take much, much longer for moderators to handle, often days (whereas other flag types take mere hours at most). Here are three examples from my flagging history:

• isset() and empty() make code ugly - Declined, not locked
• source of historical stock data - Marked as helpful, but not locked
• Log4j 2.0 vs. Logback Declined, post eventually deleted - image of deleted post

And so, I propose:

We should have a way that non moderators can do something similar to locking that isn't deletion.

It would be:

1. Similar to protection, except it would prevent everyone from adding new answers, not just 1 rep users.
2. Have a big banner saying that this is not a particularly good question, just like historical locks
3. Would attempt to settle the debate on whether these questions should be "locked" or left closed
4. This question's tags would prevent the tag cleanup script from running, so we could keep "off-topic" tags for posterity but users without tag creation privileges couldn't create them. Further reading: Tags that only exist on locked questions, should we treat these the same as tags that don't exist at all?

###Open questions I hope to resolve in comments / answers:

1. Would this "protected" status be one-way or two-way?

• My vote: two way, as the idea is this a compromise state between deletion and not-deletion that could prevent open/close and delete/undelete wars.

Answer 1

I think that particular question is a rather lousy example to use for this discussion; as I said in chat, I'm not really convinced it's off-topic at all: the author isn't asking for links to free icons or favorite lightbox plugins; he's asking a question which should have a very short, very finite number of possible answers. This isn't hard to figure out, although it does require more than a couple seconds of reading; still, asking for changes to the system in order to save close voters the trouble of reading the questions they're closing seems excessive to me.

To answer your larger request... We already do have this:

When that lock is applied, the question can no longer be closed, reopened, deleted, or have new answers or comments added to it... However, any answers may still be edited in order to keep the information contained therein "fresh".

See also: We could use better management of popular, but "bad" questions

Answer 2

We should have a way that non moderators can do something similar to locking that isn't deletion.

It's an interesting idea, but my first thought is how much of a problem is it for moderators to perform this task?
Is it a frequent or high volume thing, whereby reviewers could take some burden?
If not (and I don't believe it is) then I'm not really in favour at all. Some things can be user reviewed, some things need a higher authority.

You stated:

These questions are clearly off topic and violate the letter of the site guidelines, but they have a lot of views and aren't really causing harm

I'm not convinced that on average reviewers have enough forethought and consideration for all the potential parameters to be able to determine if a thread, which is "off topic" by definition, should remain "locked" instead of "off topic and on-hold/closed".

Such a scenario has too much potential for opinion, and difference of opinion in this case is bad.

I believe such decisions most certainly require a keen eye and good decision. And for me, that means moderators.
Moderators generally have more of an understanding of what the site/tag needs, and certainly has more of a drive to ensure highest quality outcome, more than the average user does.

Most people, whether you agree or like it or not, most certainly do make decisions with some personal interested in mind.
It's the nature of people.

Users reviewing might think "this post helped me, it's interesting, has many upvotes" etc "so I'll vote to lock instead of close as off topic".
These reasons are not valid in this instance.

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This could be argued to easily be achieved with a review queue needing a higher rep and a good number of votes in favour.
But as we know, rep is not necessarily an indication of good decision making or knowing what is actually in the interest of the site.

Bad decisions made with the current things we review can be handled, as they have high volumes and frequency and so to-and-fro is not necessarily the end of the world.

But with a low frequency issue such as a thread needing to be "locked" instead of "on-hold", and the consideration required to determine between "locked" and "off-topic/on-hold", I think it should remain a moderator managed thing.