I wanted to ask for opinions about a certain pattern of behaviour I've observed. It may be that only I am bothered by it, in which case we can all forget about it. If not, I wonder what can be done to discourage it.

There are some users (I don't really want to single anyone out) who have been asking questions in a specific subject at a fairly steady pace for the last few months or so (edit: maybe longer). Many of these questions are pretty borderline in terms of acceptability, but in most cases, taking the question in isolation, it would probably be too harsh to close it. The problem, according to me, is that taken as a whole, this pattern of serial questioning has various negative effects:

--- It lowers the average quality of questions on MO, which (maybe) puts people off the site;

--- It leads to frustration among some experienced users, who maybe feel a little like they are being expected to do people's homework for them;

--- Most important, for me, is that this is probably bad for the questioners. It seems reasonable to assume that (at least in some cases) the people asking are graduate students; if so, it seems like very bad idea for them to turn to MO every time they have a question, rather than trying to figure these things out for themselves. The obvious response is that it isn't MO's job to worry about whether students are doing what they should be doing, which is true; still, I find it troubling, and it makes me wonder whether something cannot be done.

Firstly, I would like to know if other people have noticed the same behaviour and share my feelings. If it's just me, fine. If not, I wonder if there's a way to deal with this behaviour with being unduly discouraging to the people asking (who are probably doing so in perfectly good faith). One issue is that "How to ask" only contains question-wise guidelines on what is acceptable, but not more global guidelines on using MO (like, "At some point you need to stop asking questions and figure things out for yourself!") But maybe those things are just a subset of good sense.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any ideas on what MO users could do about this kind of issue, or if the best approach is just to ignore it (edit: or rather, deal with it on a case-by-case basis).

Like Bill says, I also think this is something to handle on a case-by-case basis. This problem doesn't appear to be huge, and we don't really have any better ways of handling it.

quid: If I understand you correctly, I think you are right. Presumably if nobody answered these questions, they would stop appearing. (But I guess this is a conversation that has been had before.)

By the way, just to recap my original post, the point was not to start another discussion about how to deal with unacceptable questions, per se. Rather, the question was whether there is anything we can do to discourage certain posters from continually asking rather elementary and overspecific questions, instead of going away and figuring things for themselves.