Can we have a "isprotected" search operator?

Question

Please add a search operator that selects for (or against) the protected status flag.

Answer 1

I agree that there should be a way to search for these, especially as an absent-minded moderator.

One can search for Locked questions with locked:1, perhaps added since Gnome's comment in 2010. One can also search for closed questions with closed:1, deleted posts with deleted:1 (moderators only at this time), and as noted by Shadow Wizard hasnotice:1 to find questions with active bounties, or locked for historical value.

It seems like an oversight that protected:1 does not work the same way.

Answer 2

Since users can protect questions once they have enough rep for the privilege, this is doubly important for moderators and users to be able to search for.

I'm currently trying to investigate a potential misuse of protection privileges and being able to search with protected:true would be very useful. I suspect I would have to resort to the Data Explorer, though it's overkill for this case and that higher barrier (compared to search) may mean I won't find the time for it. A search token for it would be very useful.

Answer 3

I'm not sure that it existed when this question was asked, but the 10K moderation tools page includes a link to a list of all protected questions. The one for Meta Stack Exchange is here, the link extension being tools/protected-questions.

This is available to all moderators on their sites and to any users who have access to those tools (10k on sites the higher reputation levels and 4k on sites with lower ones).

While this page is quite useful, it's not searchable, only sortable(-ish). There's no way to restrict which questions show up there other than by date so, as in SevenSidedDie's example, you would have to sort by user and then find their name in the alphabetical list. If this search function were added, a specific user could be included in the search to find all posts protected by that user - or by Community. To make things worse, the sorting only affects the content of the current page, not the entire list, making it nearly useless.

Here on MSE, there are only 137 of them, which isn't bad with 50 results per page, but on sites that use this feature regularly, there are lots (e.g. 727 on M&TV, 659 on The Workplace).

Answer 4

You can use the following SEDE Query to produce a list of question that are currently protected:

select p.id as [Post Link]
     , p.creationdate [created on]
     , case when ph.userid is null then
         ph.userdisplayname
       else
        concat('site://q/',ph.userid,'|', u.displayname)
       end as [protected by]
     , ph.creationdate [protected on]
from posts p
inner join posthistory ph on ph.postid = p.id
left outer join users u on u.id = ph.userid
where ph.posthistorytypeid = 19  -- protected
-- make sure no unprotect took place later
and not exists (select * 
                from posthistory 
                where posthistorytypeid = 20 -- unprotect
                and postid = p.id
                and id > ph.id)

When run today this will what your result might look like for Stack Overflow:

Keep in mind SEDE is only updated once a week, on Sunday. If you're new to SEDE give the tutorial a try or join chat