Are new users banned from answering "highly active questions"?

Question

This question was asked on July 1:

Ubuntu 20.04 on a new Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 is not detecting my second monitor through HDMI

Today, a new user with 1 reputation attempted to provide an answer to that question and apparently was blocked from doing so with the following reason:

"Highly active question. Earn 10 reputation in order to answer this question. The reputation requirement helps protect this question from spam and non-answer activity."

The new user then, with no other options to contribute, created and answered a new question:

Ubuntu 20.04 on Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5 using AMD Ryzen not detecting external monitor

The original question remained unanswered and because of "comment everywhere" reputation requirements, the new user is unable to comment or link to the answer they just posted:

Don't we have reviews just for this reason: to protect against spam and non-answer activity?

What makes this a "highly active question"? My guess is that some algorithm has deemed it as such. But it does not look like anything I'd consider a highly active question in my opinion: no interactions in 24 days and no answers.

Do we have any control over this spam block? Is it really helpful to the site if it's redundant and the real-world result is that new users can't answer, questions go unanswered, and duplicates are spawned?

Answer 1

The question got a lot of views quickly and then was automatically protected after three non-answers were posted by 1 rep users.

As this happened ages ago (Aug 5th), I have unprotected the question and now 1 rep users can answer it again, consider contacting the user you mention in this post if you can.

There are no reviews for protected questions, protection is a privilege.

To learn more about why the question got protected, you can read this meta post.

Answer 2

I have edited the answer from the new question into the stub answer posted by the OP and merged the new question into the old one which moved the answer there.

I should probably have noticed that the question got protected last time it got a new NAA (because it was me who deleted it) and unprotected it, because the first two answers posted were by the same person and not spam or "me too" posts, and it was unanswered.

Recently, we (of the Downboat) unprotected some unnecessarily protected questions. I also unprotected some questions whose deleted answers were actually critiques of existing answers (like "I tried this answer but ...") rather than spam/me-too, indicating that the post needs more answers. It's a bit unfortunate that there isn't a review process for this, and also that while Community♦ often automatically protects questions, there is no process (such as a timeout) to automatically unprotect them. So anyone who has the privilege of unprotecting questions should keep an eye out for opportunities to use it.

If you see a highly active question that clearly needs more answers, but you don't have the privilege of unprotecting it (or of checking out its deleted answers), you can always come to the Downboat to get folks to look at it, raise a flag for mod attention, or post on meta.

Thanks a lot for catching this and bringing it to attention, and thanks also to Mark Kirby for also helping the OP and for answering here.