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Do we want to enable post limits?

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?


Please vote on this answer.


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.

Kit Z. Fox Mod
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