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In general, posts here on MSE are community-curated, which means that as the system changes, posts can become outdated until members of the community bother to edit them. (This was something that I worked to fix before joining the site.)

However, I noticed that the FAQ on bans and the quality filter, What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?, is locked to prevent frequent off-topic comments. I can understand that too many banned users commented about their bans, which necessitated this drastic measure, but this prevents the community from making edits.

Ideally, this feature request would be implemented, which would allow editing but not commenting. (Don't worry, banned users wouldn't be able to suggest fake edits to contest their bans; as the question is locked, suggested edits to its answers would be prevented.)

In the meantime, given the current status quo, what's the preferred way to have edits made to that FAQ? Currently, only SE employees can edit it, due to the lock, but I have several changes in mind that I'd like to make. Should I ask a new question for every set of changes, such as FAQ not mentioning allowance of one question per 6 months during question ban?, or can I just flag for moderator attention? For a larger edit, is it acceptable to give a link to my proposed Markdown on an external site, such as GitHub Gist or Pastebin?

I'm looking for an official answer from staff about their preferred way for my making such edit requests, if any. I'm aware of the comment from the moderator who locked the answer initially which says to flag, but that comment from 2012 was posted by a Trilogy moderator at the time when they were given moderator access on this site, and I'm not sure if that's the preferred way that SE would handle it. I'm also leery of this, since many of my flags have taken a very long time to eventually get handled.

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I would recommend not doing so. The question is locked for a reason. In particular, edits that try to stuff more information into that already-bloated FAQ are probably a waste of time.

If you see misleading or outright incorrect information, raise a feature-request here on meta. Be specific about the problem itself. If you can describe the problem in the space of a flag, that works too - what's critical here is that you're able to communicate the nature of the problem to someone who can fix it.

Note that we no longer use this FAQ as the first source of information for folks actually encountering q-bans, and in years of pointing folks to it who contacted us via support it was rare to encounter anyone who actually read it thoroughly or benefited from it in any tangible way. It's a necessary thing to have here, but given the nature of the problem it is attempting to solve the majority of people pointed to it will not read it - just as they didn't read any of the warnings or guidance given them along the path prior. Over the past 8 years, we've spent an inordinate amount of time leading this particular horse to water and lamenting its lack of thirst; perhaps, going forward, our energy would be better spent on those who drink deeply of their own accord.

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Personally I would suggest to make a feature request for edits that are substantial. You can mark them , so the community managers will see it and can act accordingly.

The benefit is that it allows the community to discuss the change, rather than (very busy) community managers to check each and every proposal.

I would not bother going through all the hassle for minor, not so relevant changes.

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  • My intended changes are more major. If you've seen my edits to FAQs, whether through my account or anonymously, you'll know what I'm talking about.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Aug 27, 2018 at 7:22
  • I understand. 'Asking' a new question for such changes is the way to go in my opinion. The community can come up with a good proposal (after a few iterations probably) that can be implemented by the CM.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Commented Aug 27, 2018 at 7:24
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As of December 2019, the system has been changed to allow edits (as well as votes, answers, and other interactions) to posts that have been locked with "off-topic comments" specified as the reason.

As such, I've gone ahead and applied my proposed edits to that post.

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