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I got this message: Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See http://goo.gl/C1Kwu to learn more.

Now I'm a little paranoid, so sorry if I am violating some other rule at this moment. Is there any way to tell exactly why I was suspended from asking questions? The link has a list of possible reasons, not 'the' reason(s).

Perhaps one reason is that I have been deleting my unanswered questions. I felt I was being good by cleaning up after myself. I ask a lot of questions that nobody knows the answer to. Is it better that I just leave them?

I also had one or two messages moved to serverfault.com.

I'm very sorry for whatever else I did. But I will say that I do not understand the logic against self-deletions. I delete items that are unanswered, and I do not see how it is my fault that nobody knows the answer to some of my questions. At any rate, if that is against the rules then I will stop doing it. I'm just a little curious.

Thanks, Dave

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  • If you have been suspended, your account profile would show that you have 1 reputation and you would have a message saying you have been suspended. Example of a suspended user : meta.stackoverflow.com/users/5640/geochet – HoLyVieR Jul 5 '11 at 23:02
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    The exact criteria for a question ban are kept secret, to prevent people from gaming the system. – user102937 Jul 5 '11 at 23:04
  • I've undeleted all of the questions you deleted. See if you can ask questions now. – user102937 Jul 5 '11 at 23:07
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    I looked at the geochet link, and some of the un-edited posts made by geochet. Why were they suspended? – dbasnett Jul 5 '11 at 23:07
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    @dbasnett: Erm... You don't want to know. Behind that door lies madness. – user102937 Jul 5 '11 at 23:09
  • There was a link in the message you got. Did you read that link? It should answer all your questions. Here it is again: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/86997/… – Pollyanna Jul 5 '11 at 23:22
  • I suggest asking your questions on sharepoint.stackexchange.com -- a lot of your questions are going completely unanswered on Stack Overflow effectively forever. They'd eventually get auto-deleted by the "no activity for a long time" process anyway. – Jeff Atwood Jul 6 '11 at 0:40
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    @robert we're going to change it so self-deletions of your own questions 30 days or older, don't count against you. There's a window here for abusive askers who ask, then quickly delete, then re-ask variants. – Jeff Atwood Jul 6 '11 at 0:46
  • @dbasnett: Just because the remaining posts are harmless, doesn't mean that there's not more to it. – Time Traveling Bobby Jul 7 '11 at 7:32
  • @RobertHarvey - I made a really dumb mistake bcoz i was half asleep while coding...i really thought it was not a silly problem.....until i got -5 and suspension. i had also deleted 2 questions one of which could be awesome by many people's standards. But that was unanswered for 10 days or so, so i decided to kill it anyway. – FirstName LastName Mar 5 '13 at 11:58
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I just amended our question block algorithm so it does not punish users for deleting old questions.

Keep in mind, I often ask questions that are fairly tricky to answer, sometimes they are so tricky I am stuck answering them myself.

By answering them myself I am helping making the Internet a better place.

Asking unanswerable questions is strongly discouraged especially as a pattern. However if your peers think the question is bad it will be deleted shortly after it is asked, so we handle that case appropriately.

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  • to be deployed in the next week or so. very deep in javascript madness at the moment on my clone. – waffles Jul 6 '11 at 1:07
  • Using the term "unanswerable" questions to questions that don't have answers/upvotes is misleading and punishing users for asking "unanswerable" questions is even worse. Not all tags have the same amount of activity as C# or java. Sometimes upvotes/answers are simply hard to come by even if the question is perfectly reasonable. – Lorem Ipsum Jul 6 '11 at 1:15
  • @yoda ... the new system does not punish people for asking obscure questions and then deleting a month later, the old system did. For any of these heuristics to kick in you need to be a real outlier, like ask 20 questions get no upvotes and go on a deletion spree. – waffles Jul 6 '11 at 2:18
  • You mean like what @David did. – user102937 Jul 6 '11 at 3:51
  • @Robert yeah ... only 6 out of 14 of his questions were asked in the last month. – waffles Jul 6 '11 at 3:59
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    "Asking unanswerable questions is strongly discouraged especially as a pattern" ... no ... asking unanswerable questions only means you need to find the audience for your question, unless it's wholly subjective. I'm thinking Gravell, Lippert or Skeet here, with the unanswerable Qs. Those are the ones we like to have around, if only to go "uh, I thought I was smart". – jcolebrand Jul 6 '11 at 4:08
  • @jcolebrand in general Jon / Marc and Eric are able to answer all their questions :) look how many questions they have that are unanswered – waffles Jul 6 '11 at 4:23
  • True, but if they could come up with unanswerable questions ;) – jcolebrand Jul 6 '11 at 4:24
  • @jcolbrand True, then we have a theoretical problem on our hands :) – waffles Jul 6 '11 at 4:28

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