up vote 2 down vote favorite

to any Mods out there, I know this is not under your authority and you probably have no power to fix such, but a while ago I received the "No longer accepting questions from this account" message. I read the page in the link. It's seemingly impossible to regain asking privelages since it's "a secret system" and that even so, it might go back anyways. But when I first got the error, I'd only had a reputation of about 78 or so. It went down to 40 one day, for a dumb question. Since yesterday, I've gone from 40 or 50 to 180. I still can't ask questions. I'm not asking for anyone to "unban" me, but I'd like to know my possible options of things I should do. I'm not going to create a new account. Just that I am feeling a little hopeless now, being unable to ask any of my own questions on such a [great] community board. All I'm asking is for some insight on what I should do from here on in. That's all.

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Answering questions isn't a requirement, it's good but not required. What matters is the quality of the questions and answers - that's what has caused you all of your pain - poor quality. Please, before advising others how to behave, learn how to behave correctly yourself. – Iain♦ Sep 14 '11 at 9:09
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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

The answer is kept here:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/68884/why-i-cant-ask-questions

In short, there is a heuristic in place that searches for patterns of low quality questions. The fix is to not trip the heuristic. I believe the exact conditions are not known lest people game the system, though I could be wrong.

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up vote 7 down vote

I can't go into too much detail, but what is probably triggering your question ban is that 4/7 of your questions were deleted (by you it seems).

My best advice is to go through your questions and edit them up if needed and then un-delete them.

Also see sysadmin1138's answer.

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Okay. And even if I don't ask stupid questions or get downvoted or delete my questions, do you think it is even possible to get the ability to ask again? – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 20:23
@U4, yes, you can Answer other people's question, once you've got a handful of upvotes from that you should be able to Ask again (it may take a whole day for the system to pickup the change). Note: your last 12 Answer have netted you -1 votes total; that factors into being able to Ask. – Chris S♦ Sep 7 '11 at 20:26
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sure is, just participate with answers for now when you can and unless you have HIGHLY tripped the algorithm (you havn't) you should be good – Zypher♦ Sep 7 '11 at 20:27
Thank you very much gentlemen. Cleared up a lot. – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 20:29
Also, the work you've already done has already lifted the ban – Zypher♦ Sep 7 '11 at 20:29
I just tried it ten minutes ago and it didn't work. Maybe I have to log out and in. But again, much appreciated. – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 20:34
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up vote 3 down vote

You have 63 answers at the time that I'm writing this. 14 of them have a negative score. That's almost 20%. That's really really really bad. Quality is valued over quantity.

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Not to be mean or anything, but THANKS, cap'n obvious. Sorry. Couldn't help it. But yeah, I need to work on that. – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 23:07
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@U4iK - I know it's fairly obvious, but you asked why you can't ask questions. This many bad answers has to factor in. We're a community of professional systems administrators. If you want to learn, that's fine. Sit back, soak it in, ask meaningful on-topic questions. Some of your answers are blatantly factually incorrect. That's completely unacceptable and the community has voted as such. This is, in part, causing you to not be able to contribute as much, since the system sees a large number of your contributions as bad. – MDMarra Sep 7 '11 at 23:09
Actually, the ban was magically lifted. I'm not questioning the cron job gods. And unrelated: do I have to do "@username" when commenting, even if it sends them a postbox message anyways? – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 23:10
The user whose post you are responding to will always get notifications without geting @'d. If you were replying to someone else in the comments to my answer, you would need to. – MDMarra Sep 7 '11 at 23:13
I understand. And if I include an @, will the creating-user still get a message? – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 23:17
Yes, they will. – MDMarra Sep 7 '11 at 23:17
Yes they will get a notification. – Jacob Sep 7 '11 at 23:18
Okay, thank you. – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 23:18
@U4iK_HaZe Somewhat counter intuitively, FAQs about how the SE sites work live in meta.stackoverflow.com's FAQ tag -- For your reference: How do comment replies work? – jscott Sep 7 '11 at 23:24
@jscott // Thanks guys, really. I'm obvoiusly relatively new to this system, though brilliant, is much more worrysome than a standard BB forum (voting system, reputation, worrying about proper grammar and content, and moreover, facts vs. opinion.) But hey, I'm probably not the only one. – U4iK_HaZe Sep 7 '11 at 23:55
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@U4iK_HaZe - one critical thing to remember is that SF and the other StackExchange sites ARE NOT bulletin board systems: They are Question and Answer sites. Questions should be on-topic (per the FAQ), and answers should be factually correct and helpful (either telling the asker how to do what they want, why they shouldn't, or offering alternative options). Questions and answers that meet those guidelines garner varying degrees of up-votes and positive rep. Questions or answers that do not meet those guidelines garner downvotes, especially if wrong or dangerous. – voretaq7♦ Sep 8 '11 at 4:54
Understood. Thanks. – U4iK_HaZe Sep 8 '11 at 4:56
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up vote 2 down vote

Regarding the comment you made here (cited below): Only asking questions isn't a problem, especially if they are good questions. In fact, we have many users that only ask questions and never answers any, which is unfortunate but unavoidable, I guess.

The problem is not to ask too many questions, but to have too many down votes, as it is the case with your account (a fact you called obvious). It was pointed out to you already that we value quality over quantity. I am not sure, but I guess having too many down voted questions is considered as bad by the automated "banning" system as having too many down voted answers.

So, ask as many (good) questions as you like, answer only questions you understood and that you can answer and you should be fine.

Citing the comment in question, as you should delete it on the main site:

As I so (painfully) learned, you should also answer questions and not ask so many, since A) you might be banned from asking (this is automatic) eventually, or your reputation will go down. Also, it's not meant to be a "question reaping" forum, it's an active community of question AND answer.

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