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Comment by BipolarElsa | Hacker News Reader

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BipolarElsa

I ask a lot of question, and thus get banned from asking more...

I wish they would have a "luxury" option for like 49.99 a year where students could ask like unlimited questions.

Is this crazy?

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> students

Your question has been asked and answered, probably several times. You're getting banned because you refuse to learn about and use the search function.

Flooding SO with beginner questions lowers the usefulness for everyone.

There is no hard limit on the number of questions you can ask. If you are getting downvoted or banned you are probably asking low quality questions that are frustrating for the volunteers that answer questions on stackoverflow.

This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.

Those bans (which occur for users who post many questions while receiving few positive votes) are for the sake of the community of contributors to the site. Allowing them to be bypassed for a fee would risk violating the community trust that's emphasized in this article.

Almost certainly the quality, not the quantity, of your questions was responsible for your ban.

See http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

After many years of being part of the Stack Exchange community I have come to the conclusion that folks will do whatever they can to avoid actually reading that page.

I've seen folks post questions on meta about how to get out of the ban (used to be a very regular occurrence, a bunch a day). I've seen folks post on other stack exchange sites asking how to get out. People even get emailed for this. All to ask questions which are answered perfectly well by the page they were linked to in the ban.

I've seen this so often that I can still remember the goo.gl URL that the old FAQ used to be behind (http://goo.gl/C1Kwu).

You may be interested in: https://www.codementor.io/

I have personally never used it and am unaffiliated with it, but a friend suggested it and has found it useful. He explained it to me as a dedicated, personal Stack Overflow.

how come there's no https://www.contradementor.io/ ? where am i to get an opposing point of view?

There is one. ;o)>

Not crazy but out of scope. If you need a mentor get one but SO is not for mentoring. On the other hand even 49.99 per month is too cheap for a service like this.

You could try offering that money to a TA for a limited number of email assists or phone calls. They're usually both pretty strapped for cash and people who enjoy helping.

What does TA mean in this context? Technical Architect?

My guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_assistant

There is a cost to other users in time spent sifting through questions, so it'd probably need to be a student only area. In a business environment this is something people pay for, but not $50 at a time.

How many questions does it take before you are banned?

There is no limit - the only issue is if your questions are marked as bad. If you ask questions that are answerable and work on StackOveflow, you can ask as many as you like.

If they started banning users for asking questions or even for asking poor (read extremely poor) questions, then the overall traffic would reduce significantly.

I wish. We've been doing this for 5-6 years now, and it hasn't. Quite honestly, if we could get rid of the worst 20% of questions instantly, life would be a lot better for the remaining 80%... But, identifying those 20% when often SO is their only option is... Brutally hard. I've seen the same person try to post variations on the same question dozens of times before finally getting around the quality checks... Only to have it sink like a rock because of course it was still unintelligible after all that.

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