Please allow me to ask questions again, after a year of being blocked

Question

I added a bounty to a question, lost 50 reputation points and found out I was no longer able to add comments under the question I placed a bounty on. Because of that I was not able to reply in comments when another user asked for more details. (Losing the ability to leave comments after placing a bounty is a design flaw after all this time.)

I think that if a user wastes 50 points to make a bounty then they should at least be able to still leave comments on their own bountied questions. I'm not crazy, this is a reasonable request.

But instead of being helped I am victim of a tremendous abuse of moderator power.

In claiming my human right to leave a comment and seeking help from a moderator, I was instead barred by a moderator from being able to ask any questions at all.

Was the moderator right to do so? I think not.

I don't pretend to know whys and reasons behind actions and abuses of moderators, I am only telling you what happened and why I can't ask questions currently.

I come here with the hope to remove the restriction in which I cannot ask a question. One year has passed, and I need to ask a question, simple as that. I didn't do anything wrong in the past to deserve this kind of restriction.

One year has happened since that discussion, but I always feel the need to ask new questions and I can't because I am restricted.

I hope a moderator can finally realised the injustice served to me.

I'm not a troll, and checking my profile you can see that I'm a user who contributes in questions and answers. I fix my questions and of other people.

But Super User too different from Stack Overflow. Super User is very hard for me to gain points because of my lack of knowledge so I do not have the same activity as I have on Stack Overflow, please understand that.

I'm asking for the possibility to ask a question, as I was able to previously.

I have learned from my errors (if any, because it was an injustice), but years have passed. Forget the past and remove me that restriction from my account.

Answer 1

I'm a moderator at superuser, and I'd second that this happened due to the cold hard logic of an automated system, and the moderators didn't really have anything to do with this. MSU would have been the right place to ask this since I found this by accident (Question has since been moved to SU) and you wouldn't have gotten a response from the folks who'd be best suited to answer you. We're fine with you asking something like this on MSU, since we'd get notified and we'd be able to answer you more quickly.

Lets start with the question ban. While its automatic, and the exact rules for getting unbanned are not known to us, we can apply some basic numbers and common sense to it. This ban was not put in place, nor can it be removed by moderators

You have 13 closed questions of 40 questions in total, including one where a question was closed and you asked the exact same question again (This is not productive. Improve closed questions, and it goes back in the reopen queue. Do a good enough job, and they do get reopened).

Ok, slightly over a quarter of your questions. That's pretty bad but I've seen worse. A bunch of the existing questions are zero score, which might have contributed to it. Many of these were auto-deleted due to lack of answers (not out fault, its how the system works).

Here's what we can do however - some of your questions are roombaed. I'll review out those that were deleted and not user closed (so there's nothing wrong with them except a lack of love),and I'll take a look at them, and try to reopen those that meet quality standards.

However, I won't do this all at once (no point flooding the front page, and its a fair but of work) and I cannot promise this will lift the ban, or that the questions will not get reclosed in time if they are dead again.

On your part, you may want to edit those that you think can be improved. I believe you can always view your own deleted questions. Let me know if you need a link to these. Focus on ones with no closevotes and are deleted, or can be logically salvaged, not the ones that got hit by 5 off topic closevotes and such.

If any are marginal, we'll need to talk about fixing them and how, and letting me know if the ban is lifted would be awesome.

EDIT: And since I had a bit of time, here's the deleted questions on your list and some comments about them. Unfortunately, many of these are unfixable or not worth fixing. I've also undeleted a few, though I'd recomment going through them and making them better. The comments are my own opinions and aim to both prevent future issues and to help triage these. They may or may not be correct!

Deleted questions

https://superuser.com/questions/854532/stackexchange-design-issue clearly off topic

https://superuser.com/questions/854526/stackexchange-design-issue Also off topic

https://superuser.com/questions/830247/what-means-preload-windows-in-a-laptop-specifications not really answerable

https://superuser.com/questions/797037/what-means-the-terms-sz-cp-and-bp-on-truetype-fonts closed by 5 users, not really answerable

https://superuser.com/questions/735427/where-is-the-corresponding-registry-key-for-ata-hard-drives what're you trying to do here? Focus on what you want to do, not how you want to do it

https://superuser.com/questions/740364/how-to-edit-this-resource-string-of-the-windows-dvd Not sure about if or how to fix this one

https://superuser.com/questions/629982/windows-magnifying-glass-window-turns-gray kinda hard to fix up. Its a valid question but 2 years down the road, and with no screenshot of what the issue is, its hard to answer.

https://superuser.com/questions/629134/alternative-software-to-dvdfab-application-to-rip-a-br-without-reconversion software recommendation so off topic.

https://superuser.com/questions/545709/disable-solid-colours-page-of-windows-wallpapers-menu comments are much too agressive :(. Might be a learning material recommendation, or could be fixed up.

offered bounties

How to change Winamp's default Keyboard Shortcuts?

How to set the color of the letters of the file-properties window, in windows 8/8.1? (x2)

Rename the user profile dir name in Windows 8 to the correct username, in a silent way?

I don't see any deleted ones. (And you've given away almost twice the rep you've earned. Dude, keep some for yourself!). I'd also add losing privileges if you dip below a specific reputation level is part of the system, and no one, moderators or otherwise owe it to you to post comments on your behalf. We have an entire site to take care of, not just one user.

Answer 2

Oh no! You got question-banned... by the system.

Your profile doesn't look like one moderators would love to suspend for and I don't quite see the fact a moderator can lift your ban in the near-time. For some reason, your questions were not so popular to the community and were deemed not good contributors nor helping the community by the system. So bam! You got yourself stuck in a question ban. What should you do? READ AND FOLLOW EVERYTHING THE LINK ON THE FIRST SENTENCE TELLS YOU TO DO TO LIFT THIS BAN.

Moderators can not lift your ban. They can suspend your account and lift a suspension but not an asking-ban. If you have a big bunch of questions that were deleted quite early and were downvoted (a lot probably), that might contribute to your own ban. So get on Super User and start contributing more and stop ranting on Meta.SE when it is unnecessary.