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I have just found a user who has posted about 70 questions on this site, all very short with missing punctuation and so on, and with very poor titles. Several times questions have been closed, and sometimes the user posts the same question he/she posted before. Despite the closures, the user has a net positive ~300 reputation.

I have spent the last 30 minutes editing his/her questions and left a few comments telling him/her to check out "How to ask a good question" on meta, etc. But I am worried that given the user's history, he/she will not learn from my comments. I would like something to be done so that we do not just have consistently more bad questions from this user. What else can I do?

(I expected that this has been asked before on meta, but I can't find a duplicate.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Related and related. These specifically deal with users consistently posting low quality answers, but I think the advice given applies equally here. $\endgroup$
    – Najib Idrissi
    Aug 11, 2015 at 17:38
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    $\begingroup$ @NajibIdrissi I ask this separately because in the past, people have told me they don't see low-quality answers as nearly as much of a problem, and I agree. Because low-quality answers can just be downvoted or ignored. But low-quality questions, even with absolutely horrendous titles like "matrix question", often attract high-quality answers and become representative questions for the site. $\endgroup$
    – Caleb Stanford
    Aug 11, 2015 at 17:40
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    $\begingroup$ This question is at the very least strongly related. $\endgroup$
    – user642796
    Aug 11, 2015 at 19:09
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    $\begingroup$ The tag post-ban covers users who may be banned either from new questions or new answers. $\endgroup$
    – hardmath
    Aug 12, 2015 at 14:40

1 Answer 1

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The answer is mostly contained in the question that Arthur Fischer linked:

  • Downvote and vote to close bad questions. (answer 1)

  • Note that there are automatic systems in place if a user's posts are downvoted and closed often enough. (answer 2)

The real problem, then, is just the somewhat baffling fact that the user still has a net positive ~300 reputation, and has probably escaped the automatic systems in place. This could only really be resolved with a very substantial feature request - e.g. instating bigger penalties for bad questions and downvotes; encouraging more downvotes or quicker question closure; finding a better way of detecting and penalizing questions with poor titles and missing context.

So this really just ties back to our most fundamental issue: the low quality of questions on this site in general. This in turn gets us back to PSQs, homework questions, and so on. As this has been discussed at great length in many, many other posts, I will not attempt to address it more here, but will only link to my favorite feature request on the matter.

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