Stack Overflow has been wildly successful. And maybe in some ways *too* successful.

I am concerned that Stack Overflow is being inundated by a stream of low-quality questions from users who are accidentally poisoning our well -- by turning off and turning away the core answerers who do all the real work in the system.

In theory there is "no such thing as a stupid question" but in practice, there are:

- users who can't be bothered to form sentences
- users who don't do the most basic kinds of research themselves
- users who barely even explain what it is they are trying to do

I mean a *pattern* of the above. Not an isolated incident, but 5-10 questions (or dozens or hundreds!) all showing the exact same negative characteristics over a period of days or weeks.

Now, a few of these questions is no problem for our community -- that's why we have voting, reputation, question closing, community moderators, flagging, etc. I am happy to intervene if there is a pattern of negligent, irresponsible, *failure-to-learn-anything-at-all* questions from a particular user. It's easily the #1 reason I mete out timed suspensions at this point.

All of these systems work, and have worked to date! That's the good news. That's why we have a community worth participating in, and a community worth visiting.

But.

I'm starting to see cracks in Stack Overflow as its popularity grows. At some point you have to face up to the hard reality: there are an *infinite* number of bad questions that can be asked in willful ignorance.

However smart our software, however smart our users -- we can't scale enough to defeat a million monkeys randomly typing. Not possible.

**I worry that we're not doing enough to automatically filter out obviously bad / malicious / inept questions from the system**, before the burden of having to deal with these questions lands on our talented audience of answerers. 

It's an explicit goal to make moderation easy and effortless. I can't in good conscience say we're doing that, if users have to face down a neverending flood of truly horrible, careless questions.. and hope for an occasional gem to float along.

**What can we do -- what do you suggest -- to detect and prevent these kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel questions from even entering our system in the first place?** I am willing to sacrifice a small percentage of new questions (up to 10%) as collateral damage if necessary.

(hint as a starting point: think new user / IP address restrictions, around question asking, perhaps based on history..)

###Now completed! See [self-answer](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-prevent-some-of-the-low-quality-questions-from-entering-our-system/60294#60294) below...