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A while back I asked some rather obvious questions and ended up deleting them after they were downvoted and after having read the comments by the Stack Overflow community.

The questions I am referring to

At the point of time of deleting these questions I was not aware of question-bans, was rather new to the site etiquette and had inadvertently contributed to my present question-ban.

I came across these deleted questions in the Stack Overflow reputation page and promptly undeleted them as I previously read that deleted questions contribute to the question-ban - What can I do when getting “We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account”?

These questions cannot be improved as they are questions which should not have been asked in the first place and I feel should instead be deleted.

But, as a user who cannot ask any more questions (or risk losing more reputation - I re-deleted one of the 2 above questions to just see my reputation fall by 5 points, so I undeleted again wondering about the implications), should I delete these questions, flag them to be closed or try and replace these with other well-phrased and well-researched questions when I do have one in mind?

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  • 1
    Deleting means they will forever be locked into a low score, and will permanently weigh you down. Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 14:29
  • 3
    @MartijnPieters: but what if re-opening them brings further down-votes to them? Won't that weigh him down further? Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 14:36
  • 1
    @HovercraftFullOfEels: but deleting them almost guarantees they can't get out of the ban anymore. It's why they need to fix those posts. Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 14:38
  • 10
    .........but if they're completely unfixable? I'm not trying to be a PITA, but it is a valid point he makes. Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 14:39
  • 1
    Note that you generally can't just replace a question with another; that'd be seen as bypassing your question ban, and if there were answers already, as vandalism. Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 14:39
  • So I essentially got into more trouble by re-opening the questions as if I replaced the question I would be bypassing my question ban (there are no answers to either of the questions), deleting them would reduce my reputation further and if left open people could downvote them further? Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 14:42
  • I guess you're stuck. Contact support or create a new account?
    – d4nyll
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 15:05
  • 3
    @MartijnPieters I just closed this as a duplicate but I'm a bit surprised by the advice in the answer there from a moderator. Is that guidance still appropriate today? Does SE staff spend their time on this?
    – rene
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 15:25
  • @rene: I'm sure the support team does still field requests like this from time to time as part of their job. I believe Tim could weigh in with additional details.
    – BoltClock
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 15:38
  • In such a situation, with good faith from the user (which, reading the post, seems to be evident... we are far from our usual meta rants here), shouldn't disassociation for the unsalvageable questions be the best option, @Boltclock?
    – Patrice
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 17:05
  • 1
    @Patrice: Yeah, so my advice from the duplicate question probably applies.
    – BoltClock
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 17:07
  • 4
    We get a few of these every day, @rene - with the rare exception of requests that demonstrate what BoltClock describes in the linked question (author has read the guidance in the help center and on meta, attempted to edit and improve existing questions, evidence of productive effort made to learn how to use the site and help others...) we don't really do anything with them beyond send a canned response that... Points to the extensive guidance on meta. At this point, anyone encountering a ban has already been given extensive guidance by the system; if they haven't read it, we can't do much.
    – Shog9
    Commented Jan 20, 2018 at 19:18
  • 1
    I contacted StackOverflow support and although I have not yet received a response and neither have the two bad questions been disassociated from my account but I am allowed to ask questions again. Commented Jan 21, 2018 at 3:34
  • 1
    @renee I was asking if deleting the question itself would count as contributing to the question ban as at the point of time of posting that comment I was allowed to ask questions. Leaving them up resulted in people downvoting them and I am back in the question ban again. Like I said in this question, those particular questions cannot be improved as they should not have been asked in the first place. Commented Jan 22, 2018 at 2:51
  • 1
    @JK Yes it was 100% my fault. I did not say it wasn't. By "inadvertently" I meant I was not aware there was a question ban due to deleting downvoted questions when I did so. But I do understand that ignorance does not equal innocence. Commented Jan 22, 2018 at 2:55

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