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Why am I getting “Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account”?

I post a question here a while ago when I was banned. Then somehow my ban was lifted. After that I have been answering questions for the most part. Today I felt the need to ask a question, and there is goes

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

Before, I was skeptical of the ban process. I thought it has to do with moderators. I even asked a question about this on skeptics.SE site as well which was deleted. However the discussion there before my question was deleted convinced me that the ban is totally automatic and nothing to do with moderators. I just want to point out that the ban process is quite flawed in my opinion. Here are all my previous answers enter image description here.

Any comments.

Edit: Adding my asked questions as well. I did go to reputation tab, show removed post and I do not see any deleted post there. But I know I had a couple of deleted questions that contributed to my banned in the first place months ago. Since then most of my activity is positive. In fact all of the activity you see here is after that ban. As general, you can see it is positive. My only old question that got -2 votes was https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/112336/creating-a-blog-for-software-changes which had +2 votes on it but is still not negative.

enter image description here

For a person like me, the reason one should be banned is if he spams, overposts, does not do research before asking. However that is not that case with my questions. Or may be I am too dumb to be a member of this site according to SE standards, which is good to know.

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    does the list include removed posts? you can inspect these in Reputation tab on your profile (if needed, set check box "show removed posts" to display these)
    – gnat
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 12:59
  • Note, what you don't see is the questions that have been deleted. It looks like you're right on the edge, so a few up votes would probably lift it. I'd go back and improve some of your negatively voted questions just to be sure you move more to the right of the line, just to be safe.
    – user131
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 13:00
  • @gnat, tried, that I do not see any deleted posts. I did update my question. BTW I know 3 of my questions were deleted that is when I was banned. After that ban lifted, non of my questions got deleted.
    – TheTechGuy
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 13:26
  • +1: Before, I was skeptical of the ban process. I thought it has to do with moderators. I even asked a question about this on skeptics.SE site as well which was deleted.: LOL!!
    – Jim G.
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 1:38
  • @MarkTrapp I did and I have read that link. You answered my previous question about my previous ban as well. Isn't it interesting to discuss how this ban works, seemingly if you score 400 points, you still can get banned. I have given all my question and answers and it is only for discussion, so someone can learn something from it.
    – TheTechGuy
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 12:51
  • @Dave Neither the post linked in the ban message nor the guidance I gave you the last time this came up mention anything about your reputation points have any bearing on the automatic ban: the only public metrics that were mentioned in either place are the number of down-votes you've received and the number of deleted posts you have, of which you have a lot.
    – user8
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 13:06
  • @MarkTrapp, this is very unreasonable algorithm if I want to interpret it the way you have said it. Lets say Joe has 80k reputation, -100 downvotes and 10 questions deleted. I have -15 votes, 5 question deleted. That means joe should be banned because of large number of downvotes and deleted questions? I double it. A more sensible algorithm to me is, what percentage of your question are upvoted and how much percentage of your questions are deleted.
    – TheTechGuy
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 13:13

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The ban only concerns your questions, not all your posts.

Looking at your questions I see 11 in total, of which 6 have been deleted leaving 5 still visible on the site. Of the delete ones three had negative scores, one quite a large negative score. The question ban looks at all your questions, not just the undeleted ones.

I don't know the details of the algorithm - I'm merely a moderator - but I think that if you improve your existing questions and provide high quality answers the question ban will be lifted. So you need to do the following:

  1. Edit your remaining questions, particularly the low scoring ones, to make them better questions.
  2. Edit your answers to improve them so that they gain upvotes.
  3. Provide more good quality answers.
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  • added more details in my questions. 95% of my activity above is after my first ban. Assuming I was on brink, basically this means, the above activity is not good enough to make your any safer. I scored about 400+ points during this time.
    – TheTechGuy
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 13:25
  • Speaking of questions only here, I have -12 down votes vs +2 upvotes here on meta. Apparently I can still ask question. I was once banned meta.SE even though I had about -5 downvotes. I think this is something moderators do not have a clue about. I have gotten suggestion before that you dont answer any question and only ask. Your answers are never upvoted etc etc. Improving your question which is essentially on a bad topic, can not be improved. If you delete it that is is also counted as negative.
    – TheTechGuy
    Commented Apr 23, 2012 at 14:00
  • @Dave the automatic ban does not apply to meta discussion sites. I specifically told you to provide high quality answers: your profile is filled with zero- and negatively-scored answers. Those obviously won't be enough to permanently lift any ban you have.
    – user8
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 5:36
  • @chrisF, I have been banned on meta.SO before. To me it seems like you can be banned automatically on meta site.
    – TheTechGuy
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 12:49
  • @Dave - I never said you couldn't be banned from meta. Also, Meta.StackOverflow is more like a main site than a meta site so different rules may well apply.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 12:51
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    @Dave I misspoke: automatic bans were removed (deleted post) from metas, but that was quickly changed to just simply having more relaxed restrictions on metas.
    – user8
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 13:09
  • @MarkTrapp I wish there were automatic bans on Metas...I think that's only for MSO
    – Zelda
    Commented Sep 5, 2012 at 19:09

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