I noticed a question today in which an annoyed comment was posted, see
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/22532

I wrote to Theo and he suggested I put something on Meta, so here it is.
One of Theo's phrases "Do you realize that quadruple question marks are unlikely to get your question taken seriously here" gave me an idea, which is that people be unable to post any question until they have been registered for, say, a week.

This still allows the same privacy the site currently supports, makes no judgements on what they do eventually. All it does is force someone to an extra step and a week of staring at the site before they get to ask for help. This will not change anything with people who are really dedicated to getting something for nothing, but might give pause to the average high-school student or crank. That is, the question "Do you realize" might have an affirmative answer for some, given a little lead time.

If I can figure out how to re-enter Meta after leaving it I will look at responses in the coming days. However, as always, I welcome individual replies, search for my last name at http://www.ams.org/cml

William C. Jagy
Berkeley, CA

Oof, poor timing. The comments on that post have all been (consensually) deleted, and replaced with something Noah wrote.

In fact, I think a week quarantine is a terrible idea!

We actually don't have a problem at all with the wrong people posting. More precisely, the "wrong sort of questions" are dealt with quickly, and in most cases politely and appropriately. The moderation powers distributed amongst the users are more than sufficient to deal with this, we just need to continually work on civility and helpfulness (me especially, sometimes). Much of that work happens here on meta, as we all try to explain to each other what we think is going on, and what should be done better. A lot also goes on via email (as you can see from the fact that both Will and I corresponded with people over email in regards this one post!).

Even if we did have a problem, a week quarantine would be a horrible solution. It's really important to mathoverflow that there are no barriers to participation: a mathematician can hear about mathoverflow, load it up, and jump right in. We're really excited about this, and there are lots of features in the software encouraging this (e.g. we're happy that you don't even need to register to post!).

I understand. Thanks to you both. I did wonder whether it might be considered important that there be "no barriers to participation."

You are too kind.

Yes, misleading. I typed in the title without thinking about it at all. Later I remembered all the advice and editing of MO titles when people gave poor descriptions of their problem, and wondered if anybody would read this. But I did not find any obvious method for editing the title, although now that I look I will see what happens when I click on "edit" in my initial post. Also, in case this is what you meant, there are varying opinions on what Swift meant us to learn from the piece, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal . If this wikipedia link turns out to be the same one you added I will attempt to edit this one out.