Stack Exchange doesn't allow me to answer protected questions because I gave away earned rep in bounties

Question

I noticed that I can't answer protected questions. I don't want to actually, but it says:

It was FAQ for Stack Exchange sites, but I also didn't have an ability to answer other protected questions.

I earned 270 reputation points + 100 reputation point bonus. Then I offered 350 reputation points as a bounty. Then I earned 59 reputation points. Today I started another bounty (50 reputation points), etc – I offered 4 bounties with total 500 rep. Despite the fact I started from the association bonus, I must have an ability to answer protected questions, as I earned reputation points here. But offered them as bounties.

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I now have enough reputation points, but I would like it to be fixed, because I like offering bounties very much.

I would like system to check for my bounties when it checks if I can answer protected question.

Answer 1

I assume that the check for answering protected questions is simply implemented as something like this pseudo-Python code:

threshold = 10
if user.has_assoc_bonus:
    threshold += 100
if user.rep < threshold:
    raise NotEnoughRepError("Sorry, you need more rep to answer protected questions.")

By receiving the association bonus, and then lowering your rep below 110 with your bounty, you caused this check to fail.

Is this a bug? Technically, this behavior does contradict the text of the protection notice, which says (emphasis mine):

"This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site."

Strictly speaking, it doesn't say you have to have at least 10 rep at the moment, just that you need to have earned that much rep on the site at some point in the past. So, to exactly match this literal wording, bounties, downvotes and any other mechanisms of rep loss should also be discounted.

Of course, this is almost certainly not really what was intended. Indeed, the FAQ post "What is a “protected” question?" is a bit more specific:

"Users with 10 or more reputation can answer a protected question. However, the +100 account association bonus is ignored for this check, so you must have earned 10 or more reputation on that specific site to answer a protected question."

This description does match the way the implementation seems to work: you need to have at least 10 rep on the site, excluding the association bonus, if any. As a corollary, this means that you need to have earned at least that much rep on the site (and possibly more, if you've also lost some).

(Actually, if the threshold is indeed 10+ rep, then it seems like you'd only need to earn 9 rep to be allowed to answer protected questions, since rep starts at 1. That should be doable with one question upvote and two accepts / approved edits. I'm not sure if anyone's actually tested this, though.)

I suppose, if this really mattered enough, the protection notice could be changed to say something like:

"This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have at least 10 reputation (not counting the association bonus) on this site."

However, this doesn't really seem worthwhile just to fix a minor discrepancy in an obscure corner case, especially as it would probably make the message a lot less clear to many new users, who may not immediately recognize the term "association bonus".

Anyway, on a more practical level, I see basically two obvious ways to avoid this problem:

1. If you don't want to lose privileges when you give away most of your rep as a bounty, then, as the old doctor joke goes, don't do that. Losing privileges if you give away too much of your rep as bounties is a deliberate feature of the bounty system; bounties are meant to be rare and significant, which they wouldn't be if they didn't have a cost.

2. If you've already started the bounty and lost the privileges, the only thing you can do to regain them is to earn more rep. Fortunately, the bounty system doesn't allow you to go into negative rep, and earning (up to) 110 rep isn't really that difficult — a few decent questions or answers will do it easily.

Answer 2

This is without question status-bydesign. As with all privileges, reputation loss leads to privilege loss. Answering protected questions is no different.

From the protection notice:

... To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.

If you've gained 100 reputation, and then lost 100 reputation, you don't have the 10 reputation on this site, irrespective of the association bonus.

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From the privileges page:

Note that one needs to earn 10 rep on the site to be able to answer a protected question. The association bonus does not count.

I suppose that could be reworded to explicitly discount reputation losses, but I think the semantics of it are pretty clear, and match the requirements for the site.

Putting this into a real world example:

If you want to open a bank account with a minimum balance of $1000, you have to currently have $1000 to put in the account, regardless of how much you've earned and spent and earned and spent throughout your life.

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Edit after changed bug to feature-request:

Now that you've made this a feature request, I think it's important to look at the request in the context of all other privileges. Would you also request that you should be able to vote down (125), create tags (500), see vote counts (1000), etc even after bountying your reputation below those thresholds?

If so, what sacrifice does a bounty have if there is no privilege cost?

If not, why should answering protected questions be any different from other privileges?

Answer 3

I'm sympathetic here; unlike most other means of losing reputation, offering bounties does not in any way suggest that you might not be qualified to answer.

However, determining that your reputation is insufficient due to bounty offerings is an expensive task to perform on the fly; much more onerous than just grabbing your reputation and subtracting the association bonus. Until such a time as we're able to quickly know the cost of your bounties, this must remain consistent: your reputation must cross the threshold in order for you to answer protected questions.

Answer 4

The idea consider bounties when calculating earned points is against the original design https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/129223/163139.

The idea of protecting by having at least 10 points is to ensure that the user is familiar with the particular site. If user earned 50 points, it proves that user is familiar with the site rules. Spending them on bounty should not be considered when determine eligibility for answering protected questions.

Answer 5

The amount of rep spent on bounties should not affect a user's ability to answer a question, since bounties are themselves a sign of useful participation.

If anything, a history of placing bounties should have no bearing (or even a slightly positive bearing) on whether a user ought to be able to answer a question.

Solution

Allow the >=10 rep check to be performed on gross rep, not net rep. Keep a column of gross rep in the database, and only change it when a user places a bounty (so gross rep will always be a users rep + any rep spent on bounties)

Example

User with an association bonus, gets 10 upvotes on an answer for a total of 201 rep, then places a 200 rep bounty. Their rep is 1, but their gross rep is 101, well above the 10 rep threshold for answering a highly active question.

Is it worth it?

The only remaining question is the effort worth it to cater to a relative small number of potential answerers. That's a question I can't answer.