I have a few questions.
I flagged an answer which looked like a spam under this question. The answer (by fadumu shafic) was later deleted (I am not sure whether it was deleted by the poster or moderator), but my flag was declined with a comment "a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it". Does it mean my flag was declined because it was not a spam or my flag was not helpful? As far as I remember, it was a spam.
I flagged this question to ask moderators to protect it with a comment, "This question needs protecting to prevent newbies from answering this question. I don't think there is any more valid answers to this question." And my flag was declined with this comment, "Questions are protected when there are many low rep users answering the question. That is not the case with this question."
I flagged this question to ask moderators to protect it with a comment, "I think this question needs protecting to prevent newbies' answers as there can be no better answer than the answers already posted." And my flag was declined with this comment, "Two deleted answers in four years by low rep users is not sufficient need to protect a question."
I am not posting this question to dispute moderators' decisions but I want to have a discussion on how to stop newbies' answers to (relatively) old questions.
I have reviewed so many Low Quality Answers and Late Answers. But I have rarely found any good/acceptable/on-topic answers among them posted by newbies.
If protecting old questions could be considered as a reasonable defense/way against newbies' low-quality answers, don't you think it is a good idea to protect as many questions as possible? Especially those questions which have good-quality answers with a lot of upvotes. IMHO, it will do more good than harm to this community.
I would like to have your thoughts on this issue.
Edit: I am not proposing to ban or discourage newbies from answering all old questions. I am suggesting to protect questions that can't generate more better/on-topic answers than the existing ones.
Closing a question with five good answers could be an ideal solution, but it would be very controversial. Who judges what? I don't want to raise such an issue. I don't think we need to care about those newbies who choose to answer 4-year old question without knowing the norms and rules of this community like this one. I see (sometimes) existing members don't even follow the guidelines in our help center. Now, newbies have a place in new questions and new answers. There are plenty of them. If they get more than 10 reputation points, they can always answer those questions, even the oldest one hopefully after studying some guidelines of this community.
LQA=low quality answers