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A few years ago I was a total programming noob and signed up to StackOverflow in order to get help (more like leeching) with programming issues I was having. My account was quickly blocked from asking questions and I learnt my lesson.

Fast forward today and I have a new account I had made early 2017. The account has no down-voted questions (it has up-voted ones), it has 317 rep and I have answered a few questions that have been accepted as solving people's issues etc. My account is definitely not on the grounds for a question ban.

Unfortunately, the other day I accidentally clicked 'Log in with Google' which was still associated with my old account, it somehow merged my old Profile with my current one, with that came the old picture and more importantly the old questions, plus the question ban..

The old questions are poor quality and are the reason for this ban? But how can I disassociate them with my new and healthy account? The questions are from 2015 for example, I made this account in 2017.

I'm quite worried as apparently nobody can fix this for you but this seems more of a login/merge mistake than any fault of mine.

Ideally I'd like that old Google account deleted too.

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    There really is no room for improvement, they are just old questions with no objective and have a leeching vibe about them. I've no problem with this but these old questions and ban somehow got into my healthy account that has made a good contribution to SO... Is there anyway I can reverse this.
    – fwr nr
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:45
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    "There really is no room for improvement" I just had a look at this one and noticed 3 upvoted comments suggesting an (obvious) improvement, so I think there is still room for improvement. Here is also an ignored comment.
    – Anne Daunted GoFundMonica
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:50
  • You can call it unlucky accident. But like with real accident, you can't reverse it, just work hard to repair the damage that was done.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:50
  • @AnneDaunted how am I supposed to improve when it was barely a problem, am I supposed to go back re-create it and then present it properly?
    – fwr nr
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:54
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    @AnneDaunted: Unfortunately, the SE voting model doesn't reward turd-polishing. You can improve an off-topic question as much as you like, but as long as it's still off-topic, all you're likely to get for your efforts is either nothing at all or, in the worst case, more downvotes (because editing bumps the question, causing more people to see it). I'm not saying one shouldn't still do it on principle, especially if deletion is not an option, but IME it rarely helps unless one can improve the question enough to actually make it good and on-topic.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 12:23
  • @IlmariKaronen that's the thing. I'm really stumped to be honest I put a good 6 months into contributing and all my questions before this were positive and almost all my answers were.
    – fwr nr
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 12:29

1 Answer 1

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Well, first of all, you aren't even allowed to create a new account to circumvent the question ban (example: here). That you 'got away' with it is just luck; that luck has ended now. As described in the FAQ:

The only way for the ban to be lifted is by contributing positively to the site in other ways.

This includes posting good answers, which will help regardless of whether you can improve your old questions or not.

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  • My account is already positively contributing. I was like 14 years old when I had the other account and I deleted it and came back when I understood I'm supposed to provide values to other people not just myself. I don't know how I'm going to rectify this when the weight of all these questions which just go nowhere can't really be improved?
    – fwr nr
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:50
  • I suppose that is a good idea, perhaps I will have to answer some more questions.
    – fwr nr
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:51
  • That's good to hear, but apparently not good enough (yet) to compensate for the bad questions.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 10:51

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