Is there a question limit?

Question

In reference to badp's comments on this:

How does Jigglypuff's Rest work?

I was wondering if there was a limit on how many question a user can post at any given time?

This is assuming that they are all legitimate questions and not random spam.

Answer 1

There's no hard line here (literally; the 6 questions/day limit is currently disabled on this site), but if you ask 11 questions in a hour in a tag that's otherwise gotten 4 questions in ~47 months... you're likely asking too quickly.

Put yourself in the shoes of one of our answerers for this tag. If you have one question like those today, and another in a few days, and another in a week, you can give each of those the time they deserve and maybe even have some fun in answering. Instead, you're just presented with 11 questions. That probably means you're going to eleventh-ass the answers to each question because your free time today doesn't magically multiply by 11. That also mean you're only going to have an eleventh of the fun you could've had in the process.

On a Q&A site, you have to optimize for pearls (answers), not sand (questions). Askers have the moral duty to put answerers in the condition where they can get the best answers to their questions, lest they get shitty answers if any — and that's a disservice to the internet. We can have answers without questions, but questions without answers are worthless.

Answer 2

I personally do not see a problem with asking that many questions in a day (I'm pretty sure I've gotten close over a 24 hour period in the past) if they're about problems you're actually facing in a game you're playing.

However, asking that many questions within the space of an hour is quite blatantly seeding, which is something we discourage. The user in question basically asked a question every five and a half minutes for an hour, which means it's unlikely anything to do with a problem he's currently facing in game - since he wouldn't have been able to actively play the game during that time.

There is of course a potential additional problem with asking that many questions in such a short period of time; had they all actually been of a high enough quality that they had been upvoted, many of those upvotes would have been reversed after being caught by the script, leaving a nice big "serial upvoting reversed" on his account.

Many StackExchange sites have a six questions a day limit, I'm not sure why we don't and I'm not going to suggest that we have it enabled since on release day for a big game, it's quite possible to pass that limit (and many people have asked more than six questions in a day) so this would inconvenience other users.

The final point I question about all of these questions is based on one of the comments;

If this site has a Draft feature, I might. But really, you haven't convinced me to slow down.

If a moderator asks you to slow down, you don't need "convincing", just do it - that's what the moderators are here for. They can choose to moderate you if they feel it is necessary (although that didn't happen in this case as far as I'm aware) but adding comments like this doesn't help the situation at all.

Answer 3

I think the key is in the statement you made:

This is assuming that they are all legitimate questions and not random spam.

If your questions are legit, interesting, and useful - it does not matter how many you submit per day. Good questions are good questions, not matter how fast they are submitted.

Before you get too excited, consider a few things. Per the FAQ:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.

If you mouse over the upvote you'll also notice:

This questions shows research effort, it is useful and clear.

Rather than an arbitrary number, these policies enforce a quality standard that your questions must meet to be "good". When you submit a bunch of questions at once, it will arouse suspicion that you aren't researching adequately enough, or submitting real problems that you face, so bear that in mind (hence this discussion).

Also, as badp points out, if you are submitting questions for a game we don't have as many experts for, it may take longer to get your answers when you submit a bunch at once. For this reason you should submit those questions you are most interested in knowing the answers to first. While you wait, take a look around and see if you can help out others on the site.

Answer 4

Preface: This was intended to be posted as a response to kalina's answer, but kalina suggested that I make it its own answer considering its... magnitude. As a result of its original intention to be in comments, lesser thought was given to format. There are a couple of things that I am querying about the contents of this post:

(1) Define what is meant by "actively playing a game".

(2) Your (kalina's) assertion that "I don't need 'convincing', just do it" reeks of dictatorship. Following orders without explanation has been a problem of the ages.

(3) I voiced that I wasn't convinced, to coax the moderator to elaborate on the reasoning behind their suggestion. The error in this and my initial response, I'll admit, is that it should've been taken to the meta after their suggestion, though I don't believe that that invalidates my defence.

(4) Re: "block of text" feel:

Given the opportunity to post the same question, I don't feel pressed to change my formatting much from that which it was to what you edited to be. The only difference I might make is moving the questions to a new paragraph. I feel that your decision to double space all of the questions diminishes the integrity of the questions as a collective represented under the one hood of the title question, misleading others to gather a worse image as my question asking too many individual questions, which has occurred here and, albeit not possibly by your influence, in a previous, notorious question of mine.

While one may argue that given the evidence of this problem reoccurring, the problem lies with me, I defend that my sub-questions only mean to aid answerers to craft a comprehensive answer, just as a school assignment (particularly demanding a composition or oratory on a topic) may.

I also like to keep the sub-questions single-spaced as their own paragraph for ease of reading. While this question's content only has one type of paragraph other than sub-questions, if I choose to add another declarative paragraph beneath the questions, the principle that each sub-question deserves its own paragraph (i.e., double-spacing) clutters. A suggestion that my sub-questions be listed using the bullets format would be something with which I would agree to be a solution.

I'd also like to add that I keep my own journal, and the style to which I've taken to typing in it is separating ideas simply by line-breaks and only creating a new "paragraph" if the addition is sufficiently important. I suppose that I can agree that my definition of a "wall of text" can be considered abnormal. Thus, as you can see in this answer, my formatting is usually limited to line-breaks, having adopted a spartan style limited by the .txt format to which I am most accustomed.

Upon review of the other edits made to my questions and an answer that I made on the day in question, I am more amenable to those edits and admit that my decision-making when it comes to moving text into a new paragraph can be defined as curmudgeonly.

(5) Re: lack of research:

When I ask these questions, sometimes I struggle to provide information that does not obviate aspects of an answer at risk of repeating what I have stated in the question, i.e. that does not answer the question but leads to the question. Certain questions, I find difficult to add information to.

Each of the questions that I asked on the day in question are questions in which I have a legitimate interest. Allegations to any failings of will to provide a quality answer are slander against my skill, as I will testify that I did my best to make meritorious questions. I deplore mediocre content as well and am very critical to myself. My self-criticism is evidenced in the amount of self-edits that I make and my warning of so as in my profile.

(6) Re: lack of care and respect:

This is related to my second and third point. You assert that I "displayed a lack of care about the fact that a mod" suggested and requested my "slowing down". To the contrary, I was interested to learn the mod's reasoning behind this.

A decent amount of times, I have clashed with the powers that be in Arqade. Therefore, I am not a stranger to their adherence to form and the power that they wield. One may argue that this fact does not prove that I respect Arqade, as a community as Shog9 defines the concern. Indeed, this clash is to bump the invisible walls, learn the length of the chain, see how much a user is boxed in. This may lead to reactance, in the psychological definition.

However, respect should be earned. The times that I've clashed, they were usually due to conflicts about ambiguity. I usually play in the grey, if only as the gadfly.

Addenda: The following comments apply to comments in kotekzot's answer that received at least 42 comments thus far.

To the assertion that I don't care about the answers, I disagree. I critically review answers to my questions and up-vote if they are contributive, but you may find that I am reluctant to accept answers. As I say, I am rather critical, and I like to leave questions open with unaccepted answers if I feel that an improvement can be made. I have even commented so on several of answers provided to my questions.

To the impression that I only stopped after I was asked to, I would say that I stopped because I couldn't think of any more questions. I recall posting one more question after the moderator request.

For the record, I haven't counted how many questions fill the front page nor do I recall being particularly fussy about viewing the front page to confirm my saturation thereof. To fully qualify the second and last clause, I do not recall an urge to "fill the front page" or an act of checking the front page to confirm so. As a result, I am convinced that that was not a motive of mine.

Answer 5

Go ahead and ask any number of valid questions that you have. Maybe you had a bunch of questions that you wanted answers to, but only just decided to post them, or maybe the game is new and very complex and there are many things about it that aren't adequately explained. In the end, it doesn't matter - the bottom line is that if your questions are good, holding back on posting them is a disservice to the community and yourself.