I went to ask a question, and was surprised to see this warning:
I'm an active user who does research and puts a lot of effort into my posts, but I cannot avoid being question banned (well, getting close to one, but I probably won't be able to make a post that will get votes no matter how much effort I put into it).
Non-deleted question history:
And my deleted questions are:
- -4 votes, as need more focus and self-deleted (yes, this is basically the worst question possible for a ban, but it's not exactly enough by itself)
- -1 votes, got one downvote that made no sense and was deleted automatically; is this really that bad? If this is a contributing factor to my ban, they really need to change this, because it's basically a post with one downvote (that made no sense, I really put a lot of research into this post)
- 0 votes, closed as a duplicate and deleted by community
Other than the first one, this shouldn't contribute to my potential ban too much (shouldn't as in if the system was right, this would be true, not as in "probably"). I've only had 3 non-deleted posts with a net negative (-1, -2, and -2), 4 posts with net zero, and 4 posts with a positive score. I'd like to address some of these posts individually, for the purposes of showing how even a user who puts all the research they can still get downvotes:
- Which UTF-8 character is the widest?: I answeredWhich letter of the English alphabet takes up most pixels?– a highly upvoted post – with an answer telling how to determine the best UTF-8 character programmatically. In a comment, someone suggested that I'd make a separate self-answer. I thought that was a good idea, seeing as it really wasn't an answer for that question. So I posted a question about that, and it got downvoted with no explanation. It also received a close vote, which makes no sense because a post about which UTF-8 character takes up the most pixels isn't any more off-topic than the one about which letter of the English alphabet takes up the most pixels. Now it's closed and deleted.
- How can sha512 create hashes bigger than the string it is supplied with?, a genuine, on-topic question about algorithms. Downvoted without explanation.
- How do I use the Windows Magnification API in Python to invert the screen?, a self-answer that took about a week and someone else helping to figure out how to do it. Downvoted without explanation and closed, probably as it's short and the downvoter didn't notice this was a self-answer. I've now updated it to show a partially done example (doesn't make much sense, since I already know the answer, that's how I'll use self-answering from now on).
- How can I have Python TTK use the Windows OS default progress bar theme?: -1 votes, which makes sense because it really was a poorly asked question (from my early days of SO), I edited it and I added clarity and debugging details, and started a bounty. Nothing, showing that it's not easy to "edit questions and improve them" like the help page says to do when you get banned.
I could explain the posts with zero net votes too, but I think you get my point.
The purpose of this post
This post is not about asking to have the ban warning removed from my account (which would be off-topic for MSO), but rather showing how the algorithm bans committed users and needs to be changed. Stack Overflow is no longer the small community it once was, and users don't think carefully before voting or find the good posts, they get buried in all the "please help I need to make a button with a shadow" questions. This is a major problem, and the algorithm needs to be less strict; this shouldn't be auto-interpreted as a bad series of questions.