What happens to folks who get question banned, by and large?

Question

There is a steady stream of duplicates of What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"? coming in lately. It's got me wondering. Roughly speaking, out of say 100 folks who get this ban, how many

• wander away and never interact with SO again?
• do the sorts of things that might lift a ban, but don't get it lifted?
• do the sorts of things they should, and lift the ban?
• post a question of their own on Meta which we close as a dupe?

Among the continue-to-interact folks, is there a difference in success rate between those who post on Meta about it (motivated, but not good rules-readers, who nonetheless get customized advice) and those who do not (better rules readers, but working to some extent blind) - which do better?

Is there a reasonable chance of recovering from a ban, assuming you care enough to try?

Answer 1

Before you read this, let me remind you once again that q-bans aren't exactly a fixed state: since they're based on a bunch of different past activities and associated responses from the community which can and do change without warning... It's entirely possible for someone to qualify for a ban and never realize it because by the time they go to post again things have changed (and the reverse is also true). There's no "ban has been lifted" event recorded anywhere - either they try to ask and get blocked, or they try to ask and it goes through. That said...

In the past 30 days:

• 5117 users have hit the Question Quality Ban on Stack Overflow.

• 216 of them have gone on to ask at least one more question.

For all time:

• 26 thousand Stack Overflow accounts have hit the ban at some point. 4.9K have gone on to post more questions. 2.3K have then gone on to hit the ban again.

• 718 users have gone back and edited at least one of their old questions after being banned. 455 were later able to ask another question.

• 2932 have posted at least one answer after the ban. 1907 of them were later able to ask a question.

• Most folks who've encountered a q-ban haven't done much of anything afterwards.

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See also:

How many people are asking SO questions on Meta because they're question-blocked?

Those curious to see more recent (Dec 2015) numbers for SO can find them here.

Answer 2

Is there a reasonable chance of recovering from a ban, assuming you care enough to try?

By and large I cannot comment, but I am an example of a question-banned user who makes a positive contribution to SE, and is attempting to clear the ban by-the-book.

I am still question-banned on MSO, after a significantly good week on both SO (about 1.5K rep, #199 for the week) and MSO (500+ rep, #30 for the week). I had some good luck admittedly, but luck on it's own is insufficient to generate those results. It would be nice to have SOME idea how close I am to getting the question ban lifted; honey still catches more flies than vinegar, last I saw.

Update Another set-back; an MSO question that I posted a good upvoted answer for just got deleted, costing me 80 rep. I wonder if the deletion of that answer further deepens my hole, even beyond the 80 rep loss, becasue of being removed by management along with the question. I thought the question was a good one, on how reward systems influence human behaviour in the context of SE.