Is posting several "trivial" questions in bulk encouraged for the site? What’s the solution for it?

Question

Summary: a certain user is at large, spamming the site with trivial questions, the answers to which he is aware of, just for votes. Is such behaviour encouraged, if not what’s the solution?

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UPDATE 16/10/2021- The same user is back with his incessant basic questions, with at least 2 identified usernames:

1. Fun Life
2. User 23998 He had previously deleted his account. Please give a solution.

Detailed: Of late, there has been a user who had been answering many Mahabharata-related questions. He seems to have a fair insight about where (evident from his answers), to find the material on the sacred-texts site, in relation to the questions answered by him. However, he hadn’t received many votes, probably due to a lack of formatting that hampers readability, and used to make trivial edits to answers. All of a sudden there has been an avalanche of trivial questions related to Mahabharata, the answers to which he seems to be aware of, having read quite a bit of the Sacred texts Mahabharata (as stated above). He may not have read the entire but he has a very fair idea, meaning he asks some (not all) questions for getting votes. It is evident from his comment to this question where he asks, about which asuras incarnated as Kaurava and others? In the answer below, it has been mentioned Karna is a portion of Narakasura, to which he replies:

Karna is not incarnation of narakasura but he is a portion of surya – Abhiram Ekula 16 hours ago

This shows that he has a basic idea. When you know why you asking? This is not even knowledge sharing.

A few people have requested him to discontinue this. Examples of such questions are:

1. What boon did Rishi Durvasa give to Kunti, the mother of Pandavas?
   

This is too much trivial. It's a duplicate already. Please just google search.

2. Who is the guru of Bhishma, Drona, and Karna?
   

Please don’t ask questions and answers unnecessarily only for votes. We know you’ve read the entire sacred texts Mahabharata. It’s not worth the effort – Archit 12 hours ago

He deleted this particular one thereafter. Despite so many attempts he didn’t stop spamming the site.

Now proof of asking for the heck of it:

He asks Who cursed the snakes that they will die in Emperor Janamejaya's snake sacrifice? about 15 hours ago

After this he asks, Which Kuru king of Pandava race performed the snake sacrifice where the Mahabharata was recited first by Vaisampayana? about 10 hours ago, i.e. after asking about Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice. He knew that Janamejaya performed snake sacrifice yet he asks who which Pandava descendent performed snake sacrifice, just for votes.

And the list goes on and on. As I have repeatedly stated:

He knows where to find in the sacred text version. He just wants votes and problem is he’s not getting as many as he wants. He thinks by asking multiple questions he’ll get answers and at least he can get +2 +2 by accepting them or by chance questions may have a higher chance of being voted. – Archit 43 mins ago

Question:
What is the solution to such behaviour which is not encouraged? There’s nothing the mods can do here.

Every question in such a long list can’t be monitored, irrelevant ones can’t be closed, can’t be flagged as low quality. I would personally find it mean to downvote him when he’s doing this whole drama to get points. Let this discussion apply to anyone else exhibiting similar behavior in the future too and not specifically this user.

Yet the site is being spammed and other good QnAs don’t get a chance to be seen by people, as they get lost amongst these kinds of "spam questions". Also, so many unanswered questions bring the score of the site down and DELAYS GRADUATION.

EDIT:-
Also another issue. On going to his profile one will see that he has deleted just a few minutes back, all questions which had net downvotes. All of a sudden reputation has shot up, without community voting. Very clever tactic?

EDIT 2:
questions likely flagged as duplicates or downvoted are being converted to entirely new questions

Answer 1

As others said in their answers, it is evident here that user is deliberately asking questions just for sake of reputation. If an user vandalizes site with low quality trivial questions, alert the system by heavily downvoting his posts as soon as he posts questions, so that he would encounter question block. This would also defy his purpose of getting easy rep. Heavily downvoted questions also don't appear of frontpage.

From above meta post:

We believe asking questions on our site is a privilege, not a right. If, after a few fair attempts, you haven’t been able to prove that your contributions to Stack Overflow make it at least … not-worse … then we reserve the right to refuse your questions. If we don’t do our part to cull the bad questions, then we risk alienating the true experts who provide what really matters: the answers!

In these cases, community can solve this by voting. If there is no enough participation from community or user doesn't change after encountering question ban, then mods can intervene and either warn or ban him based on severity of issue.

Answer 2

Currently, the problem is becoming severe even more. Out of the top 20 active questions, 16 questions are already asked by him. One is allowed to ask the questions which one knows as one can self answer also. But asking these huge no. of questions in this short interval of time is certainly like spamming the site.

If one really wants to ask these questions, one should show patience and ask one or two questions daily so that site doesn't get flooded suddenly by a huge number of questions.

In the StackOverflow site, it is a common practice to heavily downvote questions when they do not show any research effort, we might as well do something like this. Doing this we achieve:

• It stops one from asking questions just for sake of reputation.
• The system automatically bans such users for a certain time from asking questions.

If this problem stops, then we can slowly edit the questions which we previously downvoted, and undownvote them or upvote them also.

There are some questions which are just asked for the sake of asking questions like:

If Kripacharya can be immortal, why Dronacharya was not offered the boon to be immortal?

What would happened to the earth in Kali Yuga if the Kurukshetra war did not happen and if people with divine weapons knowledge existed in Kali yuga?

What are the similarities of Ravana and Duryodhana besides being the villain of their epics?

Old users of HSE might remember that during the Saxena era also he asked lots of questions but he maintained a time interval between the questions and hence it didn't become like spamming.

Another thing we should stop doing for the time being is we should stop upvoting any questions (he asks) even if they are good until this problem gets solved. We might upvote them later if those questions deserved upvotes. Getting some upvotes in some of the questions might be encouraging him to ask more and more questions.

So here is what I suggest we should do:

• Let's post the link of this meta question in the question he asks as a comment so that he knows what is going on.

• Let's wait for the flood of another wave of questions and if the same behavior is repeated let's downvote questions. After his several questions are downvoted he will automatically be banned by the system from asking questions. We might remove our downvote from those questions later if the situation cools down and if they deserve.

• We can both close and downvote hypothetical questions like the ones in the above example.

• For the time being let's answer the user's trivial questions only in the comments so that the user can't think of accepting the answer and increasing reputation. We might post a real answer to the question after some days.

If doing these all also such types of behaviors aren't stopped then moderator intervention is a must. Moderators should save the site from being spammed. We can apply similar methods like this for future users also who will flood the questions on the site. This is what I suggest and think we should do. Please give your views on this!

Answer 3

If I understand correctly, there is a question ban if the user is spamming with low-quality posts. We just have to actively flag/close/downvote for it to automatically take care or mods attention.

Link

If a user cannot demonstrate, after asking a reasonable number of questions, that their contributions are making the site better (or at very least, not making it worse) then they will be blocked from asking further questions until they have demonstrated their ability to contribute positively.