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I would change something about the "ask question" button on SuperUser.

Firstly, this button will make a question form after you click it, but only after you fill out the fields and click the "submit" button will it reply that "You can't make 6 questions in 24 hours."

Instead what would be less confusing to me would be if after a click on the "ask question" button, it would say "No more questions in 24 hours".

I think it would be a little less annoying for everybody.

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  • 4
    While you certainly have a point that its not really nice to let you type a question only to tell you afterwards, you're not allowed to post it, I do wonder why you feel the need to post that many questions. You already deleted one yourself, another got closed with a second that's about to be closed. Surely you can understand we don't want you to post more questions without first learning the ropes of how our site(s) work?
    – Ivo Flipse
    Mar 18, 2013 at 13:37
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    At the current state of your account I would like to point you to this topic. It might become very relevant: What can I do when getting “Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account”?
    – slhck
    Mar 18, 2013 at 18:14
  • @slhck: Didn't I already mention that in my answer? :P "Users with a constant record of low-quality questions, as indicated by voting, closure, and deletion, may be banned from asking further questions until existing questions are improved."
    – bwDraco
    Mar 19, 2013 at 0:31
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    Yes, sorry. I didn't see the scroll bar :) @dra
    – slhck
    Mar 19, 2013 at 6:07

4 Answers 4

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The validity of your post is checked once you try to post it.

There is no real reason to do the check at a different time and show you an indicator that might simply be incorrect at the time where the validity is actually checked (as it might simply no longer be true at that point).

Assuming you wrote a lengthy post, just to be told "You can't post 6 questions in 24 hours" can be frustrating. But nobody is stopping you from leaving the tab open and hitting Post Your Question at a later time.

Similarly, consider you click the Ask Question button and it tells you "You can't post 6 questions in 24 hours". Well, maybe you posted the other questions 23 hours and 50 minutes ago and now you want to write new questions, but the system won't let you. Stupid system!!

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    Thanks! Sorry about all of the questions...
    – Blue Ice
    Mar 19, 2013 at 4:09
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    @BlueIce: No need to be sorry. Questions are welcome, they are what drives the site. I hope to see you around :) Mar 19, 2013 at 10:56
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For performance reasons, these kinds of checks are performed only at the time you submit a post. It would be too demanding on the servers to check whether you can post a question every time the "Ask Question" page loaded. Furthermore, the data you get don't make sense unless and until you submit your post.

Also, try improving your existing questions. Users with a constant record of low-quality questions, as indicated by voting, closure, and deletion, may be banned from asking further questions until existing questions are improved.

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  • I guess this is because the check must be done when you click Submit, otherwise someone could have 300 questions set up in different tabs (after passing the initial check because none of the questions have been posted) and hit submit on them all at once. So by adding a check at the Ask Question button it adds another instance of this check? Ok, but is it really that expensive? It's a read-only check and shouldn't require any fancy locking or anything. Mar 18, 2013 at 14:05
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    Disregard my previous comment. This query can be performed through a simple SELECT on the posts table.
    – bwDraco
    Mar 18, 2013 at 14:35
  • @DragonLord it's still another query, which is more milliseconds ;) Another reason they might do this be for spambots (hard to keep a good bot running when you don't know if it's working or not). Mar 18, 2013 at 16:32
  • @Breakthrough: I have to agree with you with "more milliseconds". It just doesn't make sense to make a query you really don't need to make, even if it's something simple like SELECT COUNT(*) > 6 FROM Posts WHERE (CreationDate > NOW() - INTERVAL 1 day) AND (OwnerUserId = 12345); (Replace 12345 with the actual user ID. If the query returns true, the question is rejected.) Besides, multiple such queries must be made, with each query checking different time periods and limits (such as 50 question in 30 days).
    – bwDraco
    Mar 18, 2013 at 18:05
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Posting lots of questions in a short time is an edge case. While its terribly exciting to find the stackexchange ecosystem, after a while a lot of users find that its also useful as a resource for looking up information, and that answering questions is a lot more fun and rewarding.

I mean this without meaning any offence, but I notice you haven't read all of the faq. Even without that you may have noticed quite a few your questions have been closed too. Its pretty hard, unless you get hit by a load of very interesting problems to ask that many questions at once, and once again, its not common enough to really bother with checking pre-question. The only time I've gotten anywhere close to that is during the windows 8 contest, and I was blundering my way through a new environment.

I guess that its also a good way to remind you, since it must be annoying to ask a question and then realise you can't. I however have no idea if this is an intentional goal of team SE!

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My guess would be it's related to the fact that it will auto-save a draft of it for you. Not sure how long that draft saves for, but it's beyond the browser session.

So you should be able to type in a long question, click "Post" and have it disallow you, but then close the browser (or navigate away), come back X hours later and continue on with the question where you left off.

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