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My Stack Overflow account is blocked. When I try to ask a question it shows me the error below.

Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account.

I did some research and found that the cause might be because I have too many deleted questions or something might be incorrect the way I am framing questions. I do not have many down votes associated to my questions, but I think that it should be the deleted questions. Is there a way I can reactivate my account?

I appologize for any inconvenience but the only reason I would delete a question was to clean up any questions without a proper answer hanging out there. I had no idea that I was not supposed to delete many questions. Also I know that this is not the right place to ask about my account being blocked, but I tried to email the Stack Overflow team several times, but I got no response. What is the reason for my account being blocked from asking questions and how can it be unblocked as I use Stack Overflow a lot and have no intentions of abusing my previleges?

If I know the reasons I promise I would definitely not repeat my mistakes in the future.

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    See: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/68616/…
    – ale
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 16:02
  • Deleting questions is not the issue, I think. The bad formatting of the above question might be related though? And so is not searching the site before asking this? For more details, see the link Al posted.
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 16:04
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    is there a way to reactivate my account or is this permanent:(?
    – developer
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 16:09
  • Your account is still active in that you are free to keep posting answers and comments. However, as far as I know it is impossible to regain the privilege of asking questions.
    – mmyers
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 16:20
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    @mmyers - seriously, no way to regain the ability to ask questions?
    – tvanfosson
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 17:20
  • @tvanfosson: "We don't view this as a fixable problem in these cases" -- Jeff
    – mmyers
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 17:29
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    @mmyers: This particular user's questions seem OK. All nonnegative scores, good acceptance rate. Does he have like a hundred deleted questions with negative scores or something? This isn't the type of user I would expect to be targetted by a question lockdown.
    – Welbog
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 18:03
  • The formatting of the above question alone (even with Pekka's edit) makes me believe it's very well possible this ban is good, @Killbog.
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 18:08
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    @Killbog, you may be right, and I didn't look into the account so totally my bad to base my opinion just on the above. However, unfortunately for the past days we've seen some other users with a profile that looked fine, and who claimed they did nothing wrong, but when a moderator took a look actually had a huge number of deleted (bad) questions. :-(
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 18:14
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    Hey all, the only reason I deleted questions was to clean up my account. Those were the questions without any proper answers. I also do not recollect any of them having downvotes. I had no idea that I was not supposed to delete any questions. Also for some questions, it happened that if I tried to delete them I would get a message that the question has answers and you cannot delete them. So I thought that this questions(which are deleted) wont be useful as nobody had answered them correctly, I could delete them.
    – developer
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 19:04
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    The question lockdown is meant to prevent users who ask many low-quality questions, as determined by downvotes, flags and closures(I'm assuming here as the details are kept hidden). I'm not sure whether deletion comes into play with it, but I do know that it is one of the few metrics on SO that does not ignore deleted questions. I'd like to see Jeff weigh in on this one, because from what I've seen of your questions you don't strike me as the kind of user this function is supposed to target. I could be wrong, though.
    – Welbog
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 19:57
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    I've flagged this question for moderator attention, asking Atwood's Angels for some input. It's up to them to reply, though. I am highly interested in this functionality because I was part of the initial discussions that eventually led to its implementation. I'd hate to learn that functionality I pushed for is keeping good users out.
    – Welbog
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 20:04
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    I wonder if self-deleted posts are weighted the same as community-deleted posts. Changing that could make a sizable difference in this case.
    – mmyers
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 20:09
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    (developer, see what huge difference a little formatting by @Peter does...?)
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 20:19
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    Yes you are right! Shall keep that in mind..
    – developer
    Commented Apr 11, 2011 at 20:24

2 Answers 2

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A typical amount of question deletion on an account (say, 10% of your questions) is no problem. Particularly if you're getting upvotes on your non-deleted questions.

In this particular case, there are 116 questions on the account, of which 53 are deleted.

That's a lot -- 45% of all your questions were deleted.

Many of these deleted questions had answers, and were deleted before our much stricter recent "enhanced delete protection", which means when you deleted them, you also deleted the contributions of your peers who were trying to help you in good faith.

In general, every question that is deleted is a cost --

  • at minimum, someone had to read and process that question
  • every bad question that gets deleted (for any reason) is competing with attention for other questions that were probably more worthy

To be clear, deletion is just one of many signals we look at to ascertain user quality, but I believe in this specific example it was an abusive pattern and was correctly mitigated.

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    To enhance this good explanation a bit: note that old, low-score questions will be deleted automatically as well. Not sure how that affects the calculated user quality, but: asking poor quality questions is simply never a good idea.
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 10:47
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    Does that mean that I will never be able to ask any questions from now on..I would again suggest that it would be better if you put some kind of warning when one is trying to delete questions or just disable the delete functionality after a threshold is reached. As in my case I had no idea that I was not supposed to delete questions. And the deleted ones are the only ones that do not have answer or that do not have correct answers even though they have been tagged as answers posted by the user..
    – developer
    Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 14:14
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    And as I said before, when I tried to delete some questions it would not allow me by saying that This question has answers and you cannot delete them. This did not happen with all the questions and I was able to delete some of them. So I had an impression that it was fine deleting them as they might not be of much use to the community either. Again I had no idea of abusing the system or deleting contributions of other users. It was just to clean up my account so that it had only unanwered questions or questions which had correct and precise answers.
    – developer
    Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 14:19
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    @developer: stop and think about that though. You're deleting answers that someone put effort into writing, in response to a problem you posted. Even if it's wrong - especially if it's wrong - you could at least acknowledge that by telling them so. Instead, you remove the question and answer, in some cases minutes after the answer was posted, leaving whoever posted it with nothing for their efforts, wondering what happened. And you didn't realize this might be seen as somewhat abusive, especially after the first dozen or so?
    – Shog9
    Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 16:30
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    Yes, I guess you are right. But again I had no intentions of abusing anybody and I apologize if I unknowingly did that with my actions. Now I guess after days of asking questions and comments, I take it as it is not possible to unban my account from asking questions. I am really thankful to SO, as it had helped me a lot so far with all my queries. If you guys really think that this is a irreversible mistake I would understand.
    – developer
    Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 17:05
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    And the only thing I would say is that for using SO for more than a year its kind of frustrating to see that one fine day my account just got banned without any prior notice or warnings of my just one particular action. But if that is how things work so be it.. Thanks again for all the help so far..
    – developer
    Commented Apr 12, 2011 at 17:07
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    @developer how are you banned? you just can't ask questions. Perhaps broaden your perspective a little to how you can help others?
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Apr 13, 2011 at 0:32
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And just for the record, given the title of this question:

Deleting questions just to repost the same thing again to get more attention, is not appreciated at all.

(For old questions, see Getting attention for unanswered questions?. For recent questions: be sure you've asked a good question. And then some patience, please.)

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    I have never deleted any questions just for reposting them. FYI, this title was editted and was not posted by me..
    – developer
    Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 14:31
  • @developer, just for your information: any question on the Stack Exchange network is not just some personal help (or: should not be). It should serve some generic purpose. Hence my answer, to the question that was (rightfully so) made more generic by someone.
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 14, 2011 at 21:29

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