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It seems that every time a certain billionaire launches a bunch of satellites in his quest to inflict the internet on every last corner of the Earth we get a whole bunch of "what are these objects moving in a straight line" questions.

Should we put a notice on the "ask question" page about checking whether said billionaire has recently been launching stuff before asking the umpteenth question on this subject, or something to this effect?

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    $\begingroup$ I added the feature request tag as well, because we don't have the capability to add a notice to the ask question page on our own, that would be something SE would have to add. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    Nov 12, 2019 at 21:46
  • $\begingroup$ I've linked to your question here. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Jan 6, 2020 at 8:37

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Yes.

update: Additional problems:

  1. Premature, reflexive close-voting of Several stars in line because it has the words "stars" and "line". It hasn't been established for sure that they are moving and there are only three stars which could be orion's belt if static, or the A-train constellation if moving.
  2. Overzealous down voting of Stars are moving in row What could it be? attempts to penalize one new user for other new user's equally valid questions. SE never requires people to search the site before asking their first question. We should do that in helpful comments, not silent, anonymous down votes.

I think it's a great idea if such a thing can be done. If we had AI it could sense "line of stars or objects" somehow and pop a message up asking "do you think it could be some billionaire space venture" or a more appropriate message.

I don't think that the rate of these question has reached anything like an annoyance or pain threshold yet, so at least currently these can be addressed by closing as duplicate with the "does this answer your question" auto-generated.

In the mean time, it is important to remember that each time a new user comes here to ask about this phenomenon (or anything else) it is a new and different individual coming to Stack Exchange to learn a little bit about Astronomy, and we need to treat them the same way as any other person asking their first SE question.

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