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Why is there a cap of 50 questions per month in stackoverflow.com? I'm sure 70 is pretty reasonable if you ask me, but 50 questions a month is hardly 2 a day.

Edit:

My proposal is to have a cap of 150 questions in 3 months, instead of 50 questions a month. You guys do know when sometimes we are cracking something way above our ability and we do need alot of help for that project. In this recommendation, its a win-win situation cause the total amount allowed is still 50 questions per month.

Well just my 2cents. Otherwise people would just create 1 more account to use just because once or twice a year they exceed the cap of 50 questions a month.

(You could inform the user that he can only ask 150 questions every 3 months whenever he exceeds 50 questions in a single month)

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  • 40
    I suspect if you're asking two programming questions a day for a month you probably should probably consider attending college/university to learn in a more structured, guided and supported, manner...
    – David Thomas
    Apr 30, 2011 at 23:44
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    StackOverflow's Teach Yourself ___ in 21 Days
    – Anthony Pegram
    May 1, 2011 at 0:33
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    @Anthony: surely, at two questions a day, it'd be "StackOverflow's Get Someone Else to Teach Yourself ____ in 21 Days" =)
    – David Thomas
    May 1, 2011 at 0:44
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    I suggest that, instead of transforming your original question into something completely different, that you instead open a different question altogether and suggest the "150 in 3 months" idea there. By converting your question like you have, you're invalidating the answers people gave that were addressing your original question, and it ends up really muddying the whole thing.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 3, 2011 at 18:31

2 Answers 2

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I upvoted the question because it's valid and deserves an answer, IMO. The answer is likely, as the others indicated in comments, to disincentivize asking lots of questions. A main goal of SO, as I understand it, is to help make better programmers, and you don't become a better programmer by getting others to solve your problems or do your research. When you're making a good-faith effort to solve each problem, one question a day should be more than sufficient. Then you've still got 20 left over for a really difficult month.

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  • +1 for the good-faith answer; my thanks to you, for this; and my apologies to @Pacerier for my (perhaps unduly) glib response. Sorry! =)
    – David Thomas
    May 1, 2011 at 1:33
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There's a point you have to realise in your programming career where you've found yourself in the wrong vocation.

Needing to mooch off the kindness of strangers in a way where 150 over the span of three months is a limit you'd be touching is time to seriously look at either a new field or whether or not anything is sticking and if any of it ever will.

It's a win-lose on the heels toward a lose-lose situation.

With the flooding and question quality that comes with such a rapid fire need, you won't have anyone answering soon enough.

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  • I do not think that 1.66 questions a day is called "flooding"
    – Pacerier
    May 1, 2011 at 23:39
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    @Pacerier, from one person, maybe not. But there's currently (as of writing, and according to Stackexchange itself) 604,617 users. If even half of those users asked their maximum allocation of questions per month that'd be 15,115,450 questions per month. Currently the network has 'only' 1.4 million questions in total (according to data.stackexchange.com's front page (as of writing)).
    – David Thomas
    May 2, 2011 at 23:27
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    @David Thomas i mean to say that it will like average out.. and the limit should be set based on a single user's point of view. what happens when stackoverflow has 6 million users? should we then limit each user to 0.166 questions per day?
    – Pacerier
    May 3, 2011 at 11:15

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