Do we want to enable post limits?

Question

The question of posting limitations was brought up several months ago, wherein we learned that there are post limits for some SE sites and not for others. We learned that the limitations are 6 questions per day and 50 questions per month, which everyone seemed to agree was quite reasonable.

At that time, the community felt that users who posted an excessive number of questions were few and far between. Because of that, we didn't want to give the impression of targeting a particular user who had been posting many, many questions every day for a few weeks prior to proposal of enabling the limitations. The community preferred to have the moderators intercede, which we did, and then we moseyed on about our business.

Since that time, we have had a number of new users who have posted a flood of questions in their first two weeks of being members. The moderators have tried to catch these users and help them slow down, in a fashion similar to the previous situation (and thus reduce it to a problem previously solved).

Although it has not been a huge number, just a handful—I can think of at least four without looking—moderators would not have had to intercede at all if the question limits were enabled. I believe that the limits would have helped the users better than moderation interaction (because it is the system and not a person imposing the restriction). I also feel the users would have had a more positive interaction with the community because they would have been prevented from asking many low-quality questions, so the feedback they received from the community would have been more focused (six comments asking to show more research instead of forty, six closed questions instead of forty). In addition, the community would have been significantly less frustrated by users who don't seem to learn, and the users would have been less frustrated at having all their well-intentioned attempts met with criticism.

In short, it is my belief that enabling the restrictions will reduce the large amount of friction that can be generated by a very small number of users who need a certain sort of guidance on how to use this site effectively.

I would like to request that the question limitations (6/day, 50/month) be enabled on our site. We need a StackExchange employee to do this. We also need your approval. What say you?

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Please vote on this answer.

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Please also post an answer with your perspective on the topic (if you so desire). I feel we've had a lot of consideration for why restrictions are a good idea, and I want to make sure we haven't overlooked any compelling reasons why having the restrictions is a bad idea.

Answer 1

Up vote: Implement the 6/50 restriction.

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Down vote: Do not implement the 6/50 restriction.

Answer 2

I can see definite advantages to all users if these restrictions were implemented. KitFox has mentioned the obvious ones.

No one objects to a slew of good questions. If a user decided to post, say, 12 good questions in the span of 24 hours, I think everyone would be happy, and everyone would win. However, in reality this is not a scenario I have ever witnessed (granted I've only been here for going on 8 months.) The proposed limitation will not affect the vast majority of users here in any negative manner.

What it will do is prevent a situation that's problematic. Generally I don't like close voting, preferring the site to be welcoming and that users (including myself) provide helpful advice about questions. But when such advice goes unheeded, or worse yet, results in nasty exchanges in comments and meta posts challenging down votes and closings, no one really wins. Add to that a measure of burn out, and what we witness then is a spate of unwelcoming, sometimes downright nasty comments in response to users' poor questions. Who needs that? Multiply it by many bad questions in a short period, then fatigue and disregard spills over to relatively innocent users' questions in the form of swift, unexplained closures.

If you have been here long enough, you will recognize a few users who exemplified this behavior before (and now). Some were suspended, some banned, only to return as trolls. One has become a high rep user who obviously provides helpful answers.

Why not just suspend the offenders? Because suspension is hard. Suspension is to some extent difficult on the moderators (if you followed the election chat, you'll have read that.) It's to some degree subjective (see above), and it's punitive by nature. Why do that when a questions per day limit might possibly prevent that? By nature, it's impersonal. If someone has burning questions, they can always post them the next day. But it will prevent the spate of questions from the student who wants help with every sentence of an essay they need to write. It will allow new users to get to know the site better as they post their questions. It will prevent people who stumble upon this site from excitedly posting a slew of inappropriate questions because they got an answer to their first post. It will make the site tidier and possibly will lead visitors to see it as a higher quality site with expectations from users.

It will inconvenience a very small number of users while helping to improve the site overall.

Answer 3

Look at what we have now. I see questions being asked that, in isolation, bear all the hallmarks of a "good" question--they raise reasonable points, they're well-phrased and courteous, they clearly explain the research the asker has done and why it didn't answer the question—yet they begin to gather downvotes almost immediately, apparently due solely to the identity of the person asking the question. It's hard for me to see how that's good for anybody. Downvoting a good question because of personal animosity toward the asker is ugly and unfair, and people who do it really ought to be ashamed of themselves. Moreover, it's bad for the site as a whole when new and infrequent visitors see perfectly reasonable questions getting downvoted and closed for mystifying and seemingly arbitrary reasons. If we have a reputation for being unwelcoming and mean-spirited—and we do—maybe this is part of the reason why.

At the same time, it's absolutely possible for someone to exhaust the community's patience purely by asking an overwhelming number of questions over a short period of time, regardless of the quality of the questions themselves. Someone who persists in this behavior despite clear evidence that it exasperates people is either incapable of reading the room, or just doesn't care on some level. Either way, it's not really fair to other people who have the right to ask questions and have them receive the attention they are due.

A reasonable and impersonal question limit may be the best way to solve these problems. It may not affect many people, in practice, but it would apply to everyone equally, and that's the important part. Surely having the software handle it impersonally is a better solution than having quasi-vigilantes single out perceived bad actors for individual punishment by the moderator corps. If it doesn't affect many people in practice, that's a point in its favor, not against it. Six questions per day and 50 questions per month ought to be enough for anybody, and most people, even ones who tend to ask a lot of questions, are unlikely to ever bump up against the limit. For those that do, well, the limited allocation of questions just creates an incentive to make 'em good ones—which itself will reduce unfair downvoting and animosity toward the asker. Everyone wins.

Answer 4

Erik asked in a comment for some quantitative data. By way of example, these are real figures for one fairly prolific poster, whom I do not intend to identify. These figures come from SEDE (with the final columns being totalled in a spreadsheet), so they only go as far as the SEDE data.

I'm not sure how the fifty per month is calculated, so for this purpose I used a rolling period of 30 days.

For each date in the first column, there are the number of questions posted on that date and then the number posted during the thirty days ending on that date. The final two columns show the effect of the limits (that is, how questions could have been posted if the limits were already in place).

dd/MM/yyyy  N/Day  N/30   Ltd  Ltd-30
28/08/2013     1     1     1     1
14/10/2013     1     1     1     1
15/10/2013     2     3     2     3
19/10/2013     1     4     1     4
21/10/2013     1     5     1     5
23/10/2013     2     7     2     7
30/10/2013     1     8     1     8
08/11/2013     2    10     2    10
17/11/2013     1     8     1     8
22/12/2013     1     1     1     1
08/01/2014     1     2     1     2
10/01/2014     1     3     1     3
31/01/2014     1     3     1     3
08/02/2014     2     4     2     4
09/02/2014     1     5     1     5
11/02/2014     1     5     1     5
19/02/2014     1     6     1     6
23/02/2014     1     7     1     7
28/02/2014     1     8     1     8
11/03/2014     2     7     2     7
13/03/2014     1     7     1     7
20/03/2014     1     7     1     7
13/06/2014     2     2     2     2
14/06/2014     3     5     3     5
15/06/2014     1     6     1     6
16/06/2014     2     8     2     8
17/06/2014     1     9     1     9
18/06/2014     4    13     4    13
19/06/2014     1    14     1    14
21/06/2014     3    17     3    17
23/06/2014     1    18     1    18
27/06/2014     2    20     2    20
28/06/2014     1    21     1    21
29/06/2014     5    26     5    26
30/06/2014     3    29     3    29
01/07/2014     1    30     1    30
03/07/2014     9    39     6    36  (Only 6 possible, hold 3 till next day)
04/07/2014     1    40     4    40
05/07/2014     5    45     5    45
06/07/2014     6    51     5    50
07/07/2014     5    56     0    50
09/07/2014     3    59     0    50
10/07/2014     2    61     0    50
11/07/2014     5    66     0    50
12/07/2014     4    70     0    50
13/07/2014     1    71     0    50
14/07/2014     7    76     2    50
15/07/2014     5    78     3    50

Even a "fairly prolific" poster would only run up against the limits after a concerted spree of question-posting.

The limits are intended to allow an asker, and the community at large, some respite from posting questions. For a poster who would like to be prolific, the limits will allow a build-up to 50/month, and then a fallow period until the questions "die off", when another burst will be possible.

If the 50/month is based on a calendar month, then this user would have been able to ask all their questions up till 16 July, and then prevented from asking questions at all until the end of the month.

The limits are intended to stop only the most prolific posters. The figures at the top of this list are far more typical, and would never trigger the block. Almost all members of the community would never reach the limits at all.

Answer 5

Since KitFox has asked for some discussion that opposes the proposal to limit the number of questions that can be asked in a given period, I'll play devil's advocate. (Please note that I have not yet asked any questions, so I'm not grinding a personal axe here.)

Reasons not to have limits:

1) If I'm reading a particularly opaque or jargon-laden text, over a short space of time I might encounter numerous passages that I'm having trouble with and want some help to understand or interpret. If I can only ask a handful of questions per day, I could end up floundering for want of assistance.

2) I may be one of those insatiably curious people that love to grapple in depth with the topics that interest them, and have a tremendous capacity to absorb information and eagerly engage both with the material and with other people's perspectives. Low question limits will hamper my ability to investigate these topics, and will tend to chill my motivation and natural enthusiasm.

3) Though numerous, my questions may be so thoughtful and stimulatingly provocative that they have considerable value in deepening the understanding of those who attempt to answer them.

4) Nobody is forced to answer a question that doesn't interest them, or to which they feel they have nothing useful to respond.

5) One of the reasons that some people post many low-quality or low-interest questions may be that they either don't realize that the ELL forum exists and would be a better fit, or they don't feel happy about relegating their questions to what they perceive as being a low-status dumping-ground for questions from newbie learners of English. If that's the case, there's a more fundamental problem than the ELU forum simply receiving too many questions from a small number of prolific askers.

Answer 6

I'm of the opinion that a limit makes no sense, for the following simple reason:

If 50 new questions are added to the site in a month, it makes no difference whether they were all posted by the same user, or all posted by different users.

Somehow 50 questions posted by the same user is "worse" than 50 different users each posting a single question of similar quality. This is silly.

If you took a random sampling of 50 questions posted in the same month, why does the distribution of user names listed as the author have any impact on the quality of the questions?

If they're off-topic questions, they'll be closed as such, like any other. If they're poor questions they'll remain unanswered, like any other. If they're good questions they'll attract good answers, like any other.

If we went and edited the question database and displayed the same user name for every one of the thousands of questions currently on this site, would the quality of the questions on this site suddenly decrease based solely on the author's display name? Who cares if a given user asks a ton of questions; if they're good questions we want them here.

Throughout my involvement, as comparatively limited as it may be, in SE sites in general, the attitude I have been "raised" with here is always one of treating the question independently of the user who posts it. Obviously if a given user has a pattern of inappropriate questions it makes sense to, e.g., question-ban that user, but to impose an artificial limit on the number of questions that a user can ask - especially if those questions are good questions - accomplishes nothing at all aside from allowing less good questions to be posted on the site. It potentially hurts something, and most certainly helps nothing.

Unless you can definitively show that the general pattern of question quality on this site took a turn for the worse (which is actually the important thing here) when these users began posting, it makes no difference whether a group of questions has the same author or not.

If said "prolific" users were asking bad questions they would have been question-banned by now anyways; but they have not been, so I'm not sure what problem this limit is actually attempting to solve other than perhaps inexplicable personal peeves against people who ask a lot of questions.