I noticed that Undo was playing around with the formatting sandbox last night and protected it.
Why? Isn't the sandbox supposed to be where any user (new or old) can play around with Stack Exchange's markdown editor or the API? Has there been a flood of spam or low quality posts to the sandbox?
To clarify, my question has two parts:
Why would the sandbox be protected in general?
Why was it unprotected and then re-protected again?
Yeah, figured this'd come up. So here is the rationale.
Smokey needs the association bonus for some projects we're undertaking. For a couple reasons, it's simply better to have it under its own account than run these projects under my account (not unilaterally nuking stuff on SO is one, having things properly labelled and attributed is another).
I'd go the normal route to give it rep, but there's evidence that posts associated with the Smokey account have unfairly inflated vote counts. For example, I don't believe this is natural. I'd rather not post 'real' content with it and have that effect unfairly sort its answers above other folks'.
So that leaves three options:
I chose 3, which required unprotecting the question then restoring it to its original state. If I had to guess, I'd say it's protected so we don't get a ton of spam answers in there.
Is this sockpuppetry? Yeah, in the strictest sense of the word, I'm running two accounts. Have been for a long time. What I'm not doing is in any way getting benefit back to my main account (or any Charcoal members). I'm giving it some fake Internet points on a question that doesn't matter, and that's pretty much the extent of it.
I'm open to feedback, of course, if anyone knows of a better way to do this.
For the curious folks, we're laying the groundwork for automated flagging. It's a long ways off yet, and we have quite a bit of research to do (including dry runs, etc.) Don't worry, we're not planning a takeover. Yet.
It was protected for a long time already. Oded protected it last before yesterday at Nov 17 '14 (see revision history around 118/119).
Undo was indeed playing around with it yesterday. He unprotected it at some point and protected it again when he was done testing.
It seems correct that this is related to Smokey, as you commented yourself. The timeline indicates these steps:
The goal of these events seems to be that SmokeDetector can gain enough reputation so it can perform some basic actions like flagging on any site without the need for edits, etc.
For your updated question Why would the sandbox be protected in general?
That can have multiple reasons. For example tracking spam can get hard with the number of answers. Also, testing if you can post under a protected question on this site can be useful too sometimes. Whatever the reason is, Oded, who imposed the last protection, will have a good reason for it.
Should it be opened for everyone. I guess you could make a point for that, but I doubt it is really necessary. If you are that interested in the markdown editor, you can easily gain some reputation here.
Why would the sandbox be protected in general?
In my own opinion, it shouldn't.
However, after two deleted answers from low rep users, it is getting auto protected and even if manually unprotected, next answer that get deleted, auto protect kicks in again.
I unprotected it myself in the past, until SE employee protected it himself, and I saw no point fighting both Community and SE developer over something that isn't really crucial.
If someone really want to use it and can't due to low rep, they can ask (e.g. in chat, assuming association bonus exists) to temporarily unprotect it.
