I recently got banned from SoftwareEngineering.StackExchange.com. The point of this post is not to get the ban lifted, or to argue with the negative scores of my posts. It is to discuss the ban system and whether or not it could be improved.
The thing is, that even though I recently got the ban, the two posts that (most likely) caused the ban are more than three years old (see the screenshot). According to the guidelines the ban can be lifted by improving the score of negative received posts or simply by waiting six months. Since the posts are so old that no one will ever see them, the only real option is to wait for six months.
So here are my two points:
- Could the system be improved so that the ban occurs sooner after the negative received posts. Improving the feedback loop, would (probably) lead to faster reactions improving poor questions, leading to higher quality content. I am aware that this might be a technically difficult thing to implement though.
- Make the ban period start from the date, where the users latest poor post was submitted, rather than the users latest post (even if that was well received). This would seem like a more "fair" way of doing things, but it would possibly prevent a more poor questions, as the "time-to-think" period would occur immediately after the problematic post(s) and not years later, where the quality of the posts already increased (at least in my case).
And again, I have no hopes or expectations for my own account with this post. It is meant to discuss the system, not me personally.
What do you think?