If a user is question banned and the cause of the ban is too many deleted questions, how can the user fix this on their own? Until recently, advice has been to improve their questions, but since they can't see the questions on their question screen, they can't improve them: ( link: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Ca8Uo.jpg ).

Feature request: Allow a question banned user to see their own deleted questions, or warn them that deleting questions could lead to a question ban.

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Until such thing is in place, we can advise them to post new answers, this also should lift the ban once the answers get enough upvotes. –  Shadow Wizard Sep 12 '12 at 13:21
@ShaWizDowArd Does that resolve a question ban? –  George Stocker Sep 12 '12 at 13:22
@Dennis Indeed; in this case I'm willing to keep it scoped to just question banned users, although in reality I'd like it to be extended to everyone. In this case, the current logic presents a bad user experience: "You're banned, but because you deleted your posts (not knowing any better), you can't improve them, and thus can't get unbanned!* " *caveats apply. –  George Stocker Sep 12 '12 at 13:24
@George I'm 99% sure of that, remember I advised it to somebody and he came back later saying it indeed lifted the ban. Let me find it.. –  Shadow Wizard Sep 12 '12 at 13:24
I'd be happier if all of us could see their deleted questions, but it's more important for qbanned users. Both requests have my vote. –  Dennis Sep 12 '12 at 13:26
For what it's worth, I thought @ShaWizDowArd's suggestion was the standard advice. I don't think I've seen anyone -- other than banned users themselves -- say that the solution to question bans is improving deleted questions. –  Pops Sep 12 '12 at 14:02
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1 Answer

Why not allow any user to see their own deleted questions, even if they aren't question banned (yet)? A user might have deleted a couple of questions and, potentially, learn that they can proactively improve those to avoid a ban, instead of waiting for the ban to happen and learning how to reverse it later. I realize most won't go out of their way to learn that, but...

I think we should also consider putting more barriers in place to make it clear to users that deleting questions is not a good thing; improving them is better. I think users get delete-happy as soon as they get one or two down-votes, especially since at low rep that's such a huge impact on their rep. Under some rep threshold we should add a pop-up to say something like:

Are you really, really sure you want to delete this question? Deleting questions can be worse for your experience here than down-votes.

Not exact wording, and probably even more elaborate, but it may make a few users think twice. As far as I can tell, it doesn't harm anything to add this kind of prompt for low-rep users except the work involved in setting it up.

And as I have expressed in the past, I think we as peers need to be better about commenting / VtC instead of down-voting poor questions. I suspect that the reactions that lead to question bans are almost always triggered by down-votes.

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To appease the naysayers, you should add that this message will only appear the first time you try to delete something. A 10K user will get quickly annoyed by this. Other than that, I like the idea. +1 –  jmort253 Sep 12 '12 at 14:51
@jmort253 that's why I said, specifically, under some rep threshold –  Aaron Bertrand Sep 12 '12 at 14:52
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