I am registered on about 80 SE sites, am an "avid user"(>200 rep) on about 30, and a modest user (103-199 rep) on about 20 more.  Once when I tried to ask a question on Open Data (my "new user" site), the "systemwide" 40 minute rate limit kicked in. So I asked on meta , given that my previous post on the site was days ago. So a mod commented by telling me about the systemwide post rule and asking me if I had just come from another site. I said, yes, History (my best site, 40K rep.)  I can see why I would be rate limited on Open Data. I can understand that I would be rate limited if I had come from say, Open Source, another site where I'm a new user. But did the system "rate limit" me as a new user on one site, based on my activity on History, an "established" site?  Also, about the one day new user rate limit after a question is downvoted: Suppose a question on the previous site receives two upvotes and one downvote (net of one upvote). Is that a different situation than receiving one down downvote and no upvotes? Or does the downvote count in both cases, including the one where there were offsetting upvotes? How about if the downvoted question on the previous site was deleted?  I don't have this problem when going from one "established" (greater than 125 rep) site to another. I understand why a person would be "rate limited" going from one new site to another; SE wants people to ask questions 40 minutes apart on their new sites. In my case, I was blocked when I left an "established" site (my best) to go to a new site, which is almost the same as going to a new site de novo.  Why would this be? Or can't the system tell that my "first" site was an established site? Would I have been similarly rate limited if I went first to the "new" site, and 39 minutes later to the established site? Or does the rate limit apply only when the "destination" site is the new site?  Put another way, there are four permutations of established and new sites: 1) established to established 2) new to new 3) established to new and 4) new to established. The block doesn't apply in the first case, does apply in the second case, and apparently applies in the third. What about the fourth? And why? Because it is not "uniform" across sites in the four cases.   Edit: Unlike the other question, this one is not about the general rule. It is about the "special case" described in the paragraph above.
123768
A bit of background: I have Asperger's syndrome. One consequence of that is, generally, even a simple half-a-page post takes from 30 to 60 minutes to write and leaves me quite tired. (Which, as far as I'm aware, is much slower than average.) On the other hand, sometimes I get in the mood, feel all giddy inside and enter a sort of word-mincing berserker rage, in which case the words seem to flow a bit better and faster and less tiringly.  Also, due to various life-related reasons, at the moment I have about 4 hours of free time I can spend with computer.  So, for this reason, I have created a list of topics I would like to ask (and been wanting for quite some time) on various sites of Stack Exchange, and been carrying it around for two weeks until I finally got into a mood where I can write at a reasonable pace and had enough time.  Perceived cause: 40-minute limit per question seems to be applied across all sites of Stack Exchange, even on unrelated sub-sites (possibly applicable only to the stackexchange.com domain).  The problem: I posted . Then I tried to post another question on Sci-Fi, but ran into the 40-minutes blockade. That's perfectly reasonable and understandable - a common mechanism to stop the site from being flooded with spam.  So, I switched to Gaming SE, wrote a question from the list... and was greeted by the same message. Even though the last question I posted there was 20th February. I checked back to the question on Sci-Fi SE and, sure enough, its timestamp said it was posted 33 minutes ago.  The actual question: Is that a bug, or is that a feature? If the latter, what's the justification for it?  If that's intended, does this mean that instead of writing questions and posting them once I finished, do I have to save them to a text file, and then post them throughout the day with an egg-timer in hand?  EDIT: Posting here, on Meta SE, did not re-trigger the limit, and I managed to , but when I tried to post a question to Sci-Fi SE, I got the "You can only post once every 40 minutes." again - 1 hour after the original question on Sci-Fi SE.
118500
Being a veteran SO user and an active SE participator, it is quite-- erm, how to put it nicely--amusing to see me being reminded again and again to "not forget to mark an accepted answer" whenever I upvote one, especially at the time when I am joining a new SE site and casting my first upvote on that site.  Since somehow SO should have all the my data already, is it possible to distinguish between a real first time user, as opposed to a veteran SO user joining a new site, so that we won't have to be bothered by all the announcements, reminders that are normally reserved for the newbies?
77801
Normally new users are not allowed to up-vote until they gain a bit of reputation by receiving up-votes or accepts from the community of a site.  But this has a weak point that is being exploited:     A number of new users post, answer, and accept each others'    off-topic questions before we can close them (in less than 5 min).    Accepting each others' answers gains them enough reputation to    start up-vote each others' posts.   We are closing them and the moderators clean up afterwards but  this keeps happening over and over again and becoming frustrating  to the extent that I think a systematic solution might be required. Is there a system to prevent this kind of circumvention of  the reputation requirements using accepts by new users?  One possible solution might be to change the system so accepts from users who do not have enough reputation to up-vote  do not give any reputation (at least until the answer gets an up-vote).
58982
TL;DR: I've gotten a previous account/IP address blocked from asking questions. It is pretty much the only thing I plan on using Stack Overflow for until I'm more experienced. I don't want to be a d*ck and consistently break any rules I might be breaking, but I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.    I recently had my account blocked from using the site's most basic features, essentially removing its usefulness to me on that account. I don't want to continue breaking any rules that have gotten me banned, because I don't want to offend a community of (mostly) people who are here to help others.  Why have almost all the questions I've created received a negative voting score?  I'd also like to know if people are banned solely because of downvotes, and if not, what have I done to deserve a ban?  The posts aren't only on this account; they are also on  and .  To clarify, I have already read the FAQ and how-to-ask.html. I did this before asking any questions on my first account, and I am already complying with these.
26196
Let's have some fun shall we??  At the bottom of the content for about 1/3rd of my pages, but not in the footer, I create an internal link for each related IP address to the page on my site for that IP address. This was fine 6 months ago, but now that my database has grown so large, I discovered that it was not uncommon to create 700+ links within this section with one page having 2600. Ooopppsss!! ;-) Houston, we have a problem!  Now this is easy enough to fix. For right now, I put a limit 100 on the query. But this got me thinking and searching for a definitive answer. So far... no luck.  Please understand I do fully know the effects regarding SEO. Most of you know that already. I am not looking for a lesson- just an idea of a range.  Q: How many internal links per page is too many?  There are a lot of answers on the net culled from various nether regions and I have a number in mind (also culled), but I was thinking that there has to be an authoritative answer somewhere. Google says reasonable and MOZ's answer seemed to very arbitrary to me. Some so-called SEO experts say as little as 6 and as much as 200. Yeah. That is useful! One said there is no limit. I know there is a semi-flexible practical limit. I remember reading about this years ago, but cannot remember the mechanics behind it right now. I would have to think on this for a while.  Bonus Q: If given a choice of creating links from a random query (and yes I can do this) or first 100 or so (using limit), which would you prefer/advise and why? Again, I have an idea in mind (again, culled). Is there anything definitive in this regard as well?  My primary concerns are UX, download speed, and lastly, Giigle. (&lt;= please do not edit to change)
28348
I got the brand new Custodian badge today for reviewing posts. Inspired by that, I reviewed some more suggested edits. Now I ran into a limit:     You have no more suggested edit votes today; come back in x hours.   How is that limit calculated? I made 61 reviews today which seems to be some calculated limit.  I searched for an answer on meta but found nothing helpful.
74085
I came across a question on serverfault today that is about 18 months old.  The reason I found it is that a 1 rep user had just added an answer.  I didn't notice the date at first, and added my own answer as well.  This isn't a huge deal for one question, but what about the general case?  Does it make sense that any question over, say, a year (or even just six months) should be automatically protected? I know technology changes and we want the ability to keep older questions up to date, but remember that protecting a question only locks it for users with a small rep. What about including views as part of the equation?  A question that earns a &quot;Popular Question&quot; badge is probably getting enough views from low rep users to really need protection and enough views from higher rep users to get the edit and new answer attention when needed, but lower view questions maybe either don't need the protection or do need the edit/answer help from anyone who does happen to land at the question. Update: For context, here is a link to a query that shows actual answers that would have been blocked under this proposal, so we can judge the typical quality.  Note that to accurately judge this you have to view them in the context of answers that are already available to the question at the time the answer is added:  And here is a query to show how many questions would be effected:  Notethat this is a naive query: it only checks answer count rather than whether the answer has an upvote, and there's no way right now to know how many of these are already protected.  Using the current data set, the result is 114039, or a little less than 1/10th of all questions, and because of the other limitations it's probably even smaller.
103830
So I had  closed within eight minutes of asking.  Is this a little fast? Not only do I object to the reason it was closed (not a real question, come on I'm asking for decent books!), but it was closed insanely fast. Should there be a grace period for questions (diamond mods exempt if so) before they can be voted on to be closed?
96800
A user asks a question. It gets downvoted.(to oblivion) And then gets deleted by a mod.     This question should then be accessible to the user in the "deleted recent questions" link but this doesn't happen.    If a user has asked only one question (which gets deleted) then this link goes missing. Only after asking another question (which must not get deleted), is the user able to see that link.     Is this a bug or a new-user-restriction?
104106
:     What are the new user restrictions?      New users cannot:         post images   post more than two hyperlinks at a time, either in a post or their user profile   contribute answers to protected questions   ask or answer questions too rapidly         Why are restrictions placed on new users?      Because we allow participation from anonymous internet users, we must   take some precautions to ensure that the rare malicious or spammy   anonymous user doesn't ruin the experience for everyone else.   I understand the reasoning for disallowing images, protecting questions and for rate-limiting new users. I don't understand how restricting the number of links for new users does anything useful. The privileges page suggests that it is meant to limit the damage malicious users or spammers can do.  For spammers, I don't see the difference whether they link one time to their site, or a dozen times. The spam post will be deleted shortly in any case, I can't really see any advantage to restricting the number of links.   For malicious users you don't really need more than one link to a NSFW site to cause trouble, I also fail to see how the restriction should help there.  I , I'd like to understand how this restriction is supposed to help SE sites. It's a significant annoyance for new users, especially on sites like Skeptics, and I'm doubting whether this restriction is useful at all.  I'm thinking about requesting to remove this restriction everywhere on the SE network, but I'd like to understand the reasons behind it and it's effectiveness better before I do that. My perception of the usefulness of this restriction seems to me vastly different to what the SE team thinks of it.  Update:  The link restriction has been removed on Skeptics for a while now, and I haven't seen any increase in spam.
70548
This is my usual experience:  "I want to post a question but I don't know what kind of questions are within the rules on this site. And since I don't want a question that took me 10 minutes to write to be instantly flagged as off-topic, deleted or down-voted into oblivion I won't post until I know the rules."   But the rules are nowhere to be found. The short site description is often not enough and doesn't include any extra information, for example Server Fault says "Q&amp;A for server administrators" and nowhere does it say "Don't post questions about home servers on Server Fault" etc.  With the increasing amounts of new users wouldn't it be a good idea to have the rules defined on the front page of each site like on reddit for example?
63900
I always see Stack Overflow users giving -1 to new users' questions. This is not how you welcome a new user to the community. A new user does not know the rules yet.    I suggest that if one wants to give -1 to a new user, you prevent that and ask the downvoter to write a comment instead. new user = 2 first questions    I see the credit rating on my question is now at -9?  My question, is she not well formed or formatted? If you don't agree with the content of a question do you down-rate it? If an Ubuntu user asks a question that might not be reasonable, will you also down-rate it?  No. You post an answer that will present your thinking and correct him? I think that is part of the problem. When you first go to a community like Facebook, and you don't know the faces, you don't feel like any of those people are your relations. Newbies exist here as well, especially in a professional community.    First, welcome the new user in more appropriate way. And most importantly, force them to see/read how to post a good question.
36891
I was wondering about a question similar to  (for another site), where my &quot;stats&quot; are currently &quot;10/5&quot; (instead of &quot;13/5&quot;). The answer from &quot;Shadow Wizard&quot; links to , which links to yet another &quot;&quot;. This last answer has some details about the actual calculation (like the &quot;10&quot; in my case), which is like so:  A positive question record means you don't have too many closed, downvoted or deleted questions, overall. The formula is (total questions - negative questions - closed - deleted)/total questions &gt;= 0.5. Questions that have been downvoted and closed and deleted count three times in this calculation!  Somewhere I also read that these deleted questions seem to count for 3. But the OPer of a deleted question cannot see deleted questions anymore after a while (X days) either. So that seems to make it impossible to actually &quot;verify&quot; your own score (the &quot;7&quot; part), and also how many more &quot;good questions&quot; will be needed. In my case, I'm aware (remember) that there has been at least 1 question deleted. So I assume in my case the &quot;7&quot; must become at least &quot;8&quot; (I don't have negative or closed questions), though I doubt that will be sufficient. Also because I have 2 more questions with a zero votes balance (which makes me wonder also how accurate the &quot;total questions&quot; in the above quote really is ...). My suggestion: think of a way to somehow clarify (visualize) the formula quoted above. Or as a variation at least provide some way to find out the exact number of you questions that were ever deleted (not just the recently deleted ones). Or maybe some other type of indication to indicate &quot;how much more good questions are needed to ever receive the &quot;Curious&quot; badge. Update: I recently learned about adding deleted:yes to a query. With that, these are some more stats about my questions (using &quot;12345&quot; to represent my user id from the site where this question is about):  user:12345 is:q - results in 14 (not deleted) questions, 11 of them have a positive (&gt; 0) voting balance, none of these 14 are closed.  user:12345 is:q deleted:yes - results in 7 (deleted) questions, with this Status / Voting balance for each of them:       Question id Status Voting Balance     1 Closed +4   2 Duplicate +2   3 Migrated 0   4 Duplicate 0   5 Duplicate 0   6 Closed -1   7 Closed -4     So with that extra info, and as per the &quot;Questions that have been downvoted and closed and deleted count three times in this calculation!&quot; I think (guess) in my case the 2 deleted questions with negative voting balance corresponds to -(2*3)=-6 ... So that the &quot;stats&quot; in my case will have to become something equivalent to &quot;(11-6)/5&quot; = &quot;5/5&quot; ... Just guessing, and fingers crossed to see what will happen if I ever post a new question on that site that does not get downvoted+deleted (assuming all other votes for my existing questions don't change in the meantime).
17147
Currently new users are limited to one two links in a post. If the purpose of this is, as I suspect, to prevent spam, I think it would be safe to allow unlimited internal links (i.e. links to M?S[OFU] posts).  It would be nice to do this on MSO at least, so that users can post links to examples of their problems.  Note: I know that MSO users can get unlimited links simply by linking to their S[OFU] account. Usually someone has to tell them this though; it isn't necessarily clear.
95147
I was recently banned from having the ability to ask questions on Stack Overflow. I have read all the articles about why I was banned and I am not asking to explain why. I would like to know how the system knows when to ban you from asking a question or giving an answer.  Is there a certain number of downvotes that you have to get on questions, like a -6 reputation for asking questions, or is it more than that? I would just like to know for future purposes of what to shoot for when asking a question.  I'm not necessarily asking for the number of downvotes or anything specific. I just want to know what it is based on. Because I have only asked 1 duplicate question and 6 with no votes/downvotes. So I just wanna know if it is based off of something else like user reports
18335
A recent question on  reminded me that there is a  about awarding 10 rep per question upvote. This is mainly due to the relative difficulty and usefulness of asking/answering being different on the site (or appearing to be, at least).  The highly voted answer on PPCG is "Yes, we should do that," but it's been well over three years since it was posted. The answer there said that (at least at that time) meta.so had this implemented already, so it wouldn't/shouldn't be hard to do.  Given that it's been quite some time, I don't know if that's (still) true. I know that meat has undergone changes since then, but as long as I've been actively participating, meta.se (and meta.so before the split) has given 5 points per question upvote, not 10.  My question is: What would the process to change it look like? It's been discussed on meta.ppcg and agreed upon, so what's the next step? Or is it not feasible at all?
42487
We've never had an explicit policy around downvoting -- users are free to, if they like, cast all their votes as downvotes. Whether this behavior is desirable or not is another matter.   Now, we do discourage downvoting by making downvotes cost -1 rep to the casting voter. But, there's nothing in our policy that says continual downvoting is bad or wrong or inappropriate.  However, my thoughts on this are changing. I no longer think it is community friendly behavior to cast an extreme number of downvotes, and I am considering an explicit policy forbidding it.  Some data points (as of today):  Total SO upvotes cast: 45,555,530  Total downvotes cast: 365,192  users with more than 100 downvotes cast: 596  users with > 100 downvotes and the lowest ratio of upvotes to downvotes:           |           |         | up:down user id | downvotes | upvotes |  ratio --------+-----------+---------+---------  187712 |       201 |      37 |    0.18    2525 |       580 |     149 |    0.25  136829 |       137 |      43 |    0.31   55943 |       438 |     140 |    0.31   19405 |       236 |      94 |    0.39    5640 |      3299 |    1337 |    0.40  180659 |       126 |      66 |    0.52   78613 |       348 |     198 |    0.56   39892 |       181 |     109 |    0.60     432 |       310 |     197 |    0.63  238704 |       198 |     132 |    0.66   12643 |       170 |     116 |    0.68   18256 |       219 |     152 |    0.69  122428 |       167 |     118 |    0.70  118854 |       120 |      86 |    0.71  105662 |       273 |     201 |    0.73  187690 |       135 |     101 |    0.74    1782 |       573 |     430 |    0.75   (this is a complete list, there are no more below this threshold.)  Based on this data I am leaning towards enforcing a "no more downvotes may be cast" if    You have at least (n) votes cast total Your upvote to downvote ratio is lower than ~ 0.5