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I have received the warning that I may be blocked from asking on SuperUser SE.

I searched the Meta Stack Exchange help site, and also questions already asking about it, to find out what is the reason for my particular warning. I concluded that it is mostly likely a big number of my questions that didn't receive any votes.

This answer suggests that deleting questions after 30 days of being asked won't count against the ban. Over time I have got acquainted with the whole SE network better. So now I see that when I joined the site I asked many marginally good questions, as well as marginally on topic - mostly about two topics that I was dealing with at that moment.

Some of the questions mentioned have no answers, but many of them have one.
Would deleting these old questions be a good idea to help me get out of the "warning zone" ?

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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The warning fires even if you're not close to being blocked, and you're definitely not anywhere near that edge. The reason we do this is we want to encourage people to edit wherever possible, instead of delete.

Your questions are generally well-received, which means the automated block is something you're extremely unlikely to ever encounter. But, folks that only have a bunch of zero or negatively scored posts? The fact that we take deleted posts into consideration, and give them a bit more weight, because folks that chronically ask bad questions tend to do this, merits a warning.

You're welcome to delete stuff that you are sure is of no use to you, or anyone else. That's fine. Where possible, edit to make it useful, but that's not always possible.

Until you're established enough to guarantee that you're totally out of the scope of the block, we show it in an informational way, just so folks don't accidentally dig themselves in.

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  • Thank you for the explanation. May I ask what do you mean by being established enough ? Is it a reputation threshold ?
    – James C
    Commented Aug 20, 2014 at 21:11
  • @JamesC It's the point where you've got enough solid posts with positive scores that a slew of not-so-good posts couldn't possibly hurt to the point of being blocked. While yeah, this means you've probably reached a certain rep level, it's more a ratio combined with volume kind of thing. You're extremely close to the established point.
    – Tim Post Staff
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 4:42
  • Thank you very much once again for the explanation. It always feels good to get a positive feedback on contributing positively to the community and "fitting the standards". =)
    – James C
    Commented Aug 21, 2014 at 10:00
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Deleting questions voluntarily never helps you, it can only hurt you. If a question is really bad, a moderator or a bunch of high-rep users with the "Vote to delete" permission will get it deleted.

Basically, your question remaining on the site is an indicator that it has some value, even if that value is only to tell people what isn't on topic. And as far as the automatic ban system is concerned, deleting those questions will not be in your favor.

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