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This relates to People get lost and crash into meta - maybe we need roadblocks for their safety and the issue it's dealing with: people ask off-topic questions on here all the time. I think it's common knowledge that a non-negligible portion have certainly been question banned elsewhere.

In addition to setting up roadblocks, I think something else that would help is simply not sending people here so soon to begin with.

Let's consider the process a relatively new question-banned user goes through:

  1. Someone understands how their Stack operates extremely poorly and eventually gets question banned.
  2. The first thing they see is a message directing them to What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?
  3. Once clicking that link they realise they're on, wow, a brand new Q&A site! An active one with lots of people! With a big ol' Ask Question button in the top right!
  4. They can't use that other Q&A site so hey, maybe they can ask their question here!

Since the user understands our Q&A network poorly enough they got question banned in the first place it's also very unlikely they'd recognise step 4 is a bad idea, or they want to do it anyway because they have nothing to lose.

My suggestion: What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"? should not be a meta post, but instead a page on the per-site help center users are directed to. This reduces the likelihood they'll wind up here, instead of the current approach which puts them on a downhill slope to wind up here almost immediately.

This won't stop all the off-topic questions we get but it may at least reduce the quantity and frequency.

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    Note to other users: The related questions are not really duplicates. They have been marked as status-completed and were about adding a site in the help center. This post is about modifying this site that was created as a result of the related posts. Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 12:28
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    I wanted to write that your proposal would disallow community editing, but the post is already locked, so this is a fine idea. Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 12:30
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    I assumed SO users who get banned are directed to the identical SO Meta post about what to do when they get banned. Is that not the case?
    – n8te
    Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 12:32
  • I always thought that q-ban users are redirected to the help center already: meta.stackexchange.com/help/question-bans. The meta posts merely exist to be (ab)used as dupe target when those users still turn up on meta without showing they have read what was already offered to them..
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 12:52
  • Not having been question-banned myself, I'm going by what I've picked up elsewhere--but maybe I've learned wrong. Dx Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 13:06
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    Before even considering this, some solid metrics should be employed. In a one-week period, for instance, find out how many unique people have posted a question here and, of those, how many of them are question-banned at one or more child sites. Without that, the premise is just speculative. Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 16:09
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    Hasn’t it linked to the help center for a while? See meta.stackexchange.com/a/306585/323179.
    – Laurel
    Commented Jan 26, 2019 at 16:11

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