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I just encountered the following error:

Oops! Your question couldn't be submitted because:

users with less than 125 reputation can only post questions every 20 minutes; try again later.

Why do you have this rule? Why 20 minutes?

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5 Answers 5

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5

To avoid spamming.

125 rep is not that hard to get.

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  • 15
    Why do people always feel the need to respond to "Why do you need X rep to do Y" with "X rep isn't that hard to get"? That completely wasn't the question. To this day I don't think people should need 50 rep to comment, and it has nothing to do with whether or not 50 rep is hard to achieve
    – Michael Mrozek
    Commented Sep 23, 2010 at 20:08
  • well i have more than 100 but it still shows??
    – MetalJr
    Commented Jan 4, 2014 at 5:13
  • @Gautham because the limit was increased to 125 since this answer was originally written. I have updated the answer to reflect the change.
    – psubsee2003
    Commented Jan 28, 2014 at 12:52
  • @psubsee2003 oh thanx for the info.
    – MetalJr
    Commented Jan 28, 2014 at 13:17
  • That was my thinking too when I hit it on a site where I have less than 125 rep, but it makes no sense for users with a network profile where you have thousands of points on several SE sites respectively. Why would I suddenly become a spammer? In that case it's likelier that my account was compromised in which case I'd rather that a mod/admin steps in and locks it.
    – 0xC0000022L
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 9:17
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Spammers.

Both intentional and unintentional (you would not believe how much time you can spend explaining to new users that they should edit their questions not re-post them every time they want to make a itsy-bitsey little change...).

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19

In addition to stop spammers, it is also a way to make you write better questions.

If you're churning out more than 1 question every 20 minutes, you're not putting much effort into the questions.

The more effort you put into a question, the better answers you get, and often effort equates to time spent composing it.

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5

Because of this:

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/02/new-question-answer-rate-limits/

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-12

In Stack Exchange there are at least millions of users online that are not question banned (if I am not wrong) where each user can post new question.

Of course not necessarily and not probably that all the users are posting their question at once but it might happen in a difference of few seconds and the servers will have to handle about few hundreds of thousands of posts, which is proven that the servers can handle.

If each user is unlimited in posting new questions in time then think what would happen if all the millions of users online are posting new questions constantly and non-stop this will create a huge pressure on the servers and might even cause the servers to crash and shut down.

The only reason that this is not happening is exactly because of that question limit that you are complaining about in your question.

Few hundreds of thousands of new posts per 20 minutes is not enough big pressure on the servers and it is already proven that the servers can handle this.

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    Server limits are not the reason, nor are they a reasonable factor. Other answers from several years ago have clearly explained why rate limiting on questions is applied.
    – Nij
    Commented Aug 27, 2017 at 0:08
  • FSE is part of the problem.
    – Rob
    Commented Nov 8, 2019 at 18:51

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