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I just tried to post a question, but it was rejected. The system told me that I can't ask another question for three days.

It looks like you might need a break - take a breather and come back soon!

You've asked x questions recently, some of which have not been received very well by the community. Everyone learns at their own pace, and it's okay to make some mistakes. However, the reception your questions have received thus far might ultimately block your account from asking questions entirely.

It's been x days since you asked your last question. We ask you that you wait x days before asking again. Use this time to revisit your previous questons, editing to address any issues that folks have pointed out in comments.

Why am I getting this message and what can I do about it? I really need to ask more questions!

Return to FAQ index

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You're getting this message because you've asked at least a few questions, some of which have not been very well received by the community. In order to try to prevent you from eventually hitting a much longer-term restriction on asking questions, the system is asking that you wait for a short time before asking again. Here are a couple of ways you could spend the extra time:

  • Why not do a bit more research on what you're thinking about asking? It's good to get in the habit of asking questions only when you really need to, and making those questions really count when you do. Take some notes in your editor as you work through your problem some more. These notes will really help you ask a better question when your limit is up.

  • Take a look at some of your previous questions. Read them out loud to yourself (quietly, of course, or your coworkers might begin moving away from you). Do they read well? Is all of the information someone would need to answer your question provided within the question itself? Have you used proper capitalization, punctuation, and grammar to the best of your ability?

The ability to ask questions on the site is not an infinite resource. It's fine to come to the site and ask questions when you need to ask them, but please make sure that you really need to ask the question, and that you put thought and effort into doing so.

Now, for some questions I'm sure everyone will have:

How is the length of time that I'm limited actually calculated?

It's based on your average question score, how long you tend to wait between asking questions, how well you participate in other ways on the site, and how often you tend to revisit and improve your posts, even the positively scored ones. We don't provide the actual formula and details, only because we want folks to focus on what the system is trying to tell them, rather than trying to find ways around it.

Rate limits vary from 1 to 7 days.

How can I avoid this in the future?

Try to ask questions that folks find interesting and well-written enough to up-vote. Providing great answers to other people's questions also helps you, and of course working on your previous contributions.

I asked some friends to up-vote a few of my questions, but that didn't help!

The votes were most likely marked as suspicious by the system. While you might have received some reputation credit for the votes, they do not count toward calculating your average score. Asking friends and co-workers to up-vote your posts to help you out of being limited can actually just make it worse, for them and for you. Don't do that.

Can I contact you or a moderator to have my case examined?

We can't lift rate limits by request. If you feel that something exceptional has taken place, you're welcome to reach out to us, but the answer is probably going to be no unless something exceptional really did lead to you being limited.

Best to just wait it out and be productive with the time.

Does this mean you're no longer refusing to accept questions from certain accounts?

We never meant to just 'stop taking questions' from people, it was supposed to be a simple request that you go back and improve some of your existing questions prior to asking more. That system is still very much in place, just meaningfully harder to reach. This new system of rate limiting is designed to help you avoid that block by slowing you down a bit, and encouraging you to see more value in asking better questions.

Try not to hit that system, because it can take quite a while for some of the not-so-great questions you've written to fall out of scope of what it examines. Please, do what the system suggests by going back to some of your previous questions and doing your best to improve them.

  • 5
    This is great! 2 questions: does this mean that previously banned accounts might be unbanned (I'm ambivalent either way but people will ask)? Is it possible to make this shorter for the Help Centre? The other stuff never got read even with lots of formatting, will this? I seem to have asked 3 questions... – Ben Sep 17 '14 at 16:16
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    We'll have a much shorter version that'll appear as either a message in the UI, or a help center article, @Ben. Meta answers are usually expected to be a bit more in-depth. History tells us that most people who encounter this message won't read it, and will likely spend a tremendous amount of time waiting for rate limits to expire. Finally, some folks who were previously banned are not banned currently. Either they learned something during their time away, or they'll be back in the box soon enough. – Shog9 Sep 17 '14 at 17:25
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    @Ben It's rather interesting because we didn't do anything to notify users that had dug themselves into a block that probably never would have lifted using the previous system. Quite a few of them happened to discover that they could ask questions again, and ended up asking much better questions. These are the folks that didn't throw their accounts away when they were blocked, but instead invested more time answering and doing other things. That's precisely what the new system is going to both encourage and reward, so we're pretty excited about it. – Tim Post Sep 18 '14 at 4:06
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    @Ben (continued) My current challenge is shortening the text that we show to the user at the time that we limit them, and make sure everything they positively need to know is condensed into the two paragraphs they're likely to read. I'll then expand that a tiny bit into the help center, and include some supplementary stuff. The first two bullets in this post are for the folks that actually hit this, the rest are for everyone else that's just curious about how it works. – Tim Post Sep 18 '14 at 4:10
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    Is this only on Stack Overflow? What about other sites with question blocks? – Seth Sep 19 '14 at 13:34
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    @Seth SO for now, it's still in testing. So far, I like what I'm seeing out of it, but I want to watch it. – Tim Post Sep 19 '14 at 13:40
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    wouldn't new users simply ditch the account and open a new one? – Noctis Sep 20 '14 at 0:38
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    "SO for now" :( – Braiam Sep 20 '14 at 2:58
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    @Noctis They can, but they'll find themselves in a much harder limit (one question per week, until they've established a good history) should they return. This system actively encourages you to try and keep one account, because the limits are only easy to get out of if you have a history of at least trying to do positive things. Hence, cycling through bogus emails won't work as well as simply going back and making meaningful edits to your existing posts. Additionally, our OpenID service is now heavily rate limited for new account creation. It's easier just to do the 'right thing' now. – Tim Post Sep 20 '14 at 10:56
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    @Noctis (continued) That's part of what I aimed to fix with this, the old system usually left folks blocked with 3 unsalvageable posts, so account deletion / re-creation was the easiest thing for them to do. That was just wrong on so many levels, this fixes it, along with stronger anti-recidivism measures. More discussion about it follows up on that – Tim Post Sep 20 '14 at 11:02
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    Tim, is new kind of block protected from the trick with migration from other sites? I ask because today at Programmers we had a spike in posts suspiciously looking like these from blocked SO users, and some of these seem to be successfully migrated to SO – gnat Sep 22 '14 at 15:31
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    That's the message folks see when they're q-banned, @Braiam. See: meta.askubuntu.com/questions/7194/… – Shog9 Nov 10 '14 at 2:56
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    Feeling a bit sad because of the threat of being blocked. Wow, I thought I was a good contributor. – Yster Jan 29 '15 at 17:15
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    just ran into this error after asking only 1 recent zero-vote question 4 days ago and older questions were higher voted. zapped by new formula? :( think zero voted questions should be excluded from the calculation. – vzn Nov 30 '15 at 22:38
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    @TimPost I wasnt trolling, I was genuinely ranting (I still am very pissed at the impossibility of using python with the good old parentheses but whatever). Ok, rant is bad, fine I stopped ranting, now dear system let me keep on with the good (albeit niche) about tensorflow :-) – Caterpillaraoz Sep 26 '17 at 16:08

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