Is there an un-do loophole in the question ban algorithm?

Question

When I see questions that are obviously going to be closed due to explicit off-topicness that are honest mistakes on the part of the no-rep new user, I try to inform them about the question ban, and suggest they self-delete before their question is closed/negatively voted.

i.e.

I was just now told that self-deletions play into the question ban algorithm, which I already knew; but I was assuming it played in as:

A negatively voted or close voted question still applies the black mark to your question ban possibility regardless of deletion.

Having worked under this assumption I figure there's a simple "fairness" loophole in the algorithm that allows people to not get such black-marks on their record when they realize their mistake and self-delete to correct before getting significant enough views to acquire a negative score or closure.

Though this is merely an assumption, and after speaking with a mod I am given the impression it may be inaccurate; though the mods frequently have no real clue what goes into the q-ban algorithm. I understand many things are kept secretive to avoid people abusing the systems, but I was hoping someone in the know could inform at least this little piece to help me not mis-inform site users:

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tl;dr:

Is there a "fairness" loophole in the Q-Ban algorithm wherein users who unknowingly post low-quality content may quickly correct their mistake and avoid a black-mark on their record by self-deletion before downvotes or closure gather, or is a -5 scored self-deletion equal to a 0 scored self-deletion in the eyes of the q-ban algorithm?

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Answer 1

There are a few things we know for certain about the question ban algorithm.

• A user can be question banned for deleting their own questions. This is by design. Users should be banned for, for example, repeatedly deleting and re-asking the same question in order to keep it on the front page.

• Heavily downvoted questions count more towards the question ban than questions that have only a few downvotes.

Given these two facts, it stands to reason that even though deleting your own question does count against you, it's not as bad as waiting for it to accumulate more downvotes before getting deleted by the community.

Answer 2

I think this will defeat the entire point of the ban. Users who keep posting bad content should get banned (preferably have them learn from their mistakes instead, but we don't want them around if they don't show a particular attempt at doing so).

Ask bad question -> gets downvoted / closed -> learn from it -> don't ask bad question again.

That's how it's supposed to work. The learn from it step is often missing from questions that only get downvoted, not closed, since there's no explanation. It might be a good idea to have some (automated?) mechanism in place help users learn, such as (off the top of my head) an auto-generated comment giving or linking to generic advice for how to ask properly if a question is severely downvoted.

Though even users that ask questions that gets closed (with the correct close reason) or are given extensive comments explaining what's wrong may still not learn from it, but, if they don't, it's their own fault.

By the way, "do us all a favor" and the "you will be punished" tone in your comment may come across as very negative, although you probably wanted it to sound constructive.

Something I quickly put together:

Welcome to StackOverflow! Unfortunately asking for project suggestions doesn't conform to StackOverflow guidelines. (For this reason, this question is likely to be received negatively, so you may want to consider deleting it.) You can go here...

Text in () is optional and ... is the rest of your comment. Actually I'd prefer not to tell users to delete their question at all, since you're only one user, you have no idea how the question will be received by the community, you may have an incorrect belief about the site scope, and this could result in you leading many users and possibly good questions away from here.

The other solution for this is just:

Learn the rules of the site -> ask good questions.

Maybe focussing more on this model would help.

Answer 3

Is there a "fairness" loophole in the Q-Ban algorithm wherein users who unknowingly post low-quality content may quickly correct their mistake and avoid a black-mark on their record by removal before downvotes or closure?

There is no "loophole", but there is a mechanism. That mechanism is the fact that it takes quite a few low quality posts to trigger the ban, and there has to be very little to no positive contributions to offset them as well.

That a user removed the question quickly doesn't change the fact that they're contributing low quality content and consuming resources from the site. Possibly less than others, and the algorithm may well take that into consideration (after all, I don't know the details).

If the user is able to learn from their mistakes and post content of higher quality, or make other positive contributions to the site, then they won't be banned. If they make a pattern of asking poor questions, deleting them quickly, and never posting content the site considers "valuable" then it's a good thing that they are being banned. If they get banned then the system is working correctly because the user didn't learn from their [several] mistakes and start posting more valuable content.