You said that this Stack Exchange web sites are question and answer sites, not help forums.


Yes that is true, BUT isn't the point people to be helped. Just btw this kind of questions might not help other but usually they will get similar errors and Google will point back to those stupid non-usable questions.

The point of the Stack Exchange network is people to be helped. So my proposal is that when a question "non-valuable", just add it some kind of badge "NON Valuable". Don't ban the user who asked.

Usually when you ask a question for something you don't understand you can't really make the question valuable for others.

Also there isn't a place where you can get help like Stack Overflow. It's the best way to ask a programming question and not to be answered a year after that.

So what is your opinion about this?

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"Also there isn't a place where you can get help like Stack Overflow." Any thoughts on why this might be? –  Cody Gray May 19 '12 at 9:32
The user ban is one of the most essential features of this site. Without it, overall question quality would plummet catastrophically. Collect some experience with community moderation (flag queue, closevoting, etc.) for a while before making such a suggestion. This is one feature that must never, never be taken away. Ever. There's enough crap as it is. –  Pëkka May 19 '12 at 11:04
See also "Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand". –  Brad Larson May 19 '12 at 15:38
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3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

You do bring up a good point. I wouldn't mind if questions that figured heavily into a question ban were automatically flagged for moderator attention by Community in addition to the question ban being applied. These are definitely not posts we want to show up in Google, so most of the time they should just be deleted.

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I have a feeling this isn't exactly what the OP had in mind, but interesting idea nonetheless. –  Mat May 19 '12 at 12:37
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We're not banning users for asking one or two bad questions. They get banned for doing so repeatedly, without improving themselves.

So, no, thanks. I think the automatic ban works just fine.

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Could be, @MrLister. It could even be an issue with a shared IP address. But there's always the "If you really, really think the ban is an error" part in that same FAQ. Here on Meta, so far all my time spent on folks who were banned "for no reason" eventually appeared to have more bad content (like deleted by the author or the community) than they were telling us... But of course, the possibility of true errors are the reason to keep investigating/responding to people who feel they were banned erroneously. –  Arjan May 19 '12 at 11:08
And also, @MrLister, given that I originally started that FAQ, for a long time I saw all the comments that banned users posted to that question until it was locked. Really, most commenters had no clue, looking at the contents of those comments... –  Arjan May 19 '12 at 11:14
So, is this ban still in effect then, @MrLister? Then I assume it's on Meta? I already upvoted Question banning should work differently on Meta. Maybe you can comment there, though meanwhile that is marked status completed. –  Arjan May 19 '12 at 16:25
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Bad questions are already marked as "non valuable" in two ways:

  1. They are down-voted.
  2. They are closed.

Anyone can ask a bad question, however, if you persistently ask bad questions then the system saves the rest of us the trouble.

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Upvoted because I prefer "persistently" to "repeatedly". –  BoltClock's a Unicorn May 19 '12 at 10:36
Not that I care about the upvote, @BoltClock (I upvoted this too), but really just curious (not being a native English speaker): does "persistently" feel so much different from "repeatedly, without improving themselves"? –  Arjan May 19 '12 at 11:17
@Arjan: Well, they're about the same I guess. "persistently" just has a nicer ring to it. –  BoltClock's a Unicorn May 19 '12 at 11:24
@Arjan: persistently connotes that you do so "with purpose". –  user7116 May 19 '12 at 12:18
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