Make having a Student or Teacher badge the requirement for commenting on or answering protected questions instead of site reputation

Question

Request

Require users to have Student (First question with score of 1 or more) or Teacher (Answer with score of 1 or more) on the site to be able to answer or comment on protected questions instead of the current reputation-based requirement.

Rationale

Moderators and Trusted Users currently have the ability to protect questions. This prevents answers from users who have earned less than 10 reputation on the site, which prevents lots of spammy and noisy answers.

However, this does not prevent users with the association bonus from commenting on the question, and often these are drive-by comments with no value, which generates more flags for moderators to handle, or more review items for the community to handle.

Additionally, users who have the association bonus are prevented from answering protected questions if they have offered bounties if their reputation is less than 110 (and less than 10 for users without the association bonus).

Requiring users to have either the Student or Teacher badges on the site in order to either comment or answer will have the effect of:

1. Reducing the number of noisy comments on protected questions or answers
2. Reducing the number of flags that moderators will need to handle and the number of items in the review queue
3. Allowing those users who have contributed positively to the site but who have given away reputation through bounties to contribute on protected questions

In my view, these are all beneficial effects.

Answer 1

Difficulty in revoking badges is a real showstopper here. This would be very problematic on certain sites that depend heavily on Protect for popular questions.

If you find the rules for Protected questions too onerous, then unprotect them.

See also: https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/04/changes-and-guidelines-for-the-protected-question-status/

Answer 2

I'm looking at this from that first-time user point of view.

'Protecting' a question is designed to head off a rush of quick, unfit answers when a post attracts a lot of fly-by users not familiar with the Stack Exchange network. Adding a minimal reputation requirement takes care of that (i.e., "must have SE experience").

Your solution would certainly work, too; but is it really worth complicating that first-time user experience to that degree for the (arguably) negligible improvements this adds?

Saying you need {x} reputation to post an answer is such a simple concept. But if you have to start explaining badges and and sifting through what it means to earn [this] badge (requirements) or [that] badge (requirements) just to answer a question, that is not a good first-time-user experience.

Stack Exchange already has a reputation for being entirely too complicated and restrictive in all the wrong ways. We know why those requirements exist… but you have to be really cautious about adding lines and lines of complexity where it adds very little benefit.

For me, keep it simple; the added complexity is just not worth it.

Answer 3

EDIT: I wrote this whole answer before realizing you are only referring to protected questions. However, I think it still stands as written—doesn't change my opinions of the solution—so I will leave it as-is.

---

I think the current requirement is fine, but I have seen occasional issues on a few sites (actually all stemming from the same user across multiple sites who shall remain unnamed) where a person abused his association bonus by repeatedly posting comments which were unhelpful and highly inflammatory.

It is true that "familiarity with the stackexchange interface" and thus being trusted to know how it works, is not the same as "familiarity with the subject of a specific stackexchange site". For instance, a high reputation user on Skeptics stackexchange might have personal prejudices which kept his comments on Christianity stackexchange from reaching any high level of helpfulness or contribution. (This is a fictitious but very plausible example.)

In fact, given that the 100 rep association bonus doesn't count toward the ability to answer protected questions, there is already some precedent for de-coupling the privileges granted to users who earned the rep on that site from users who merely have a certain amount of rep because of the association bonus.

What I would recommend is this:

Keep the requirements as they are; HOWEVER, if a network user (by which I mean one who has earned no rep on that site, i.e. he has 101 rep but can't answer a protected question) has a comment flagged and removed, automatically prevent that user from posting any further comments on that site unless he earns 10 rep on that site.

I think the prevention of further comments on that site until he's earned some rep there would accomplish the goals (1) and (2) that you list, and also wouldn't give such a user much to squawk about. (And I think that point 3 could be addressed separately.)