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:
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.
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.
under some rep threshold
Users can now see recent deleted questions in their profile. We're normally not particularly eager to direct folks in that direction though, since in many cases they'd be hard-put to salvage them: most folks who hit the quality bans have made a lot more mistakes than just deleting their questions, if they had anything to do with the deletions at all...
Warning them first is a reasonable idea though. In fact, warning folks who try to delete their own answered questions would be a good idea even if the q-ban didn't exist - in many cases, this is just plain rude! So as of right now, anyone trying to delete their own question will see this:
Folks who are already banned from asking questions who try to delete their own questions will see a somewhat more candid warning:
Deleting unanswered questions can actually be a good idea (it won't help you get out of a q-ban, but if you're prompt about cleaning up after yourself it can save you from getting in deeper), so we won't be warning about that. Never the less, for those who are banned, editing to improve existing questions will remain a more effective means of getting out - so those who opt for deletion instead are just digging their own grave.
It pays to read that help center article linked to from all these warnings...
