Question

[Announcement] Newcomers to Socratic will now have restricted access to the site - "?"

Answer 1

Info on a new safety change implemented by the team!

Explanation:

As part of a new change aimed at protecting Socratic content, newcomers to the site can no longer

• edit answers that have been written by other contributors `->` newcomers can edit their own answers
• post answers to questions that have already been answered `->` newcomers can post answers to unanswered questions

In addition to these two key features, newcomers will also not be able to

• edit or move unanswered questions, including their own
• report questions or answers
• clear double-check flags raised on answers

The decision to limit the activity of newcomers was taken in light of a significant surge in extraneous and unwanted content added to the site.

Newcomers will often edit old answers or use the ability to add multiple answers to a question to spam, hawk, post abusive remarks, or simply add low-quality content.

Mind you, not every newcomer that lands on Socratic falls in that category, but the number of newcomers who impact the site in a negative way is simply too large to ignore.

In an effort to protect the content posted on Socratic, we decided to block newcomers from editing answers posted by other contributors and from posting answers to questions that have already been answered.

Ok, so what exactly is a newcomer?

We consider a newcomer to be a user who has not accumulated at least `10` activity days in exactly `1` month since the join date, regardless

• if the activity days are consecutive or not
• of how many answers the user posts in this time interval

Keep in mind that in order for a given day to count as an activity day, the user must post one or more answers--questions asked do not count!

During this `10`-day activity interval, the answers posted by newcomers will be checked by mods and Heroes in order to ensure that they meet Socratic's quality standard.

Newcomers must not

• post one-word, one-sentence, or solution-only answers
• post copied content of any kind, regardless if they cite the original source in the answer or not
• add images taken from other websites to their answers without citing the source of the image
• post unformatted math answers

When newcomers meet the aforementioned criteria, the block will be lifted. At this point, they will be considered safe members of the community and they will be able to edit answers written by other contributors and post answers to questions that have already been answered, along with gaining access to the other features I mentioned above.

If a newcomer falls short of accumulating `10` activity days in exactly `1` month since their join date, the count will be reset. At this point, the newcomer must accumulate `10` activity days in exactly `1` month after the first term expired.

This will continue until the user will accumulate `10` activity days in exactly `1` month after the previous term expired.