What should the community reaction to bad users be?

Question

I have seen people comment very aggressively to bad users on SO, and even their legitimate programming questions get voted down or even closed.

See for example the comments and down votes on this question - see other questions by this user too.

I appreciate that bad users should be punished, but to have legitimate questions down-voted/closed and aggressive comments posted seems counter to the purpose of SO.

What is the "right" reaction?

How should one respond to the comments that demand that the user accept answers?

Edit: Guess I need to rephrase my question: Is aggressive commenting and down-voting and closing of (perhaps badly phrased but) relevant questions considered acceptable behavior on SO?

Please don't get hung on details discussing the specific bad user I linked to, he is not the only one.

Answer 1

I don't necessarily agree that the question you link to was a legitimate question. The user posted some code and said "I get this error" but didn't give other basic information like what line number the error occurs on or any description of what he is doing when the error occurs or what he is trying to do. I guess it's "legitimate" in that it is actually about programming. But it is not a well-written or informative question, and downvotes are intended to discourage those kinds of questions.

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Update: I looked at the bottom 11 questions from that user (out of 31 total). Nearly all were, in my opinion, bad questions that deserved downvotes (questions were overly broad and/or very little detail was given). The only ones that seemed to be a reasonably well-worded, answerable questions with a clear problem description were this one and (to a lesser extent) this one.

What surprises me is that he hasn't gotten the hint about accepting answers, despite all the comments on his questions telling him he needs to accept some answers.

Answer 2

Some users appear to visit SO with questions that are so basic they shouldn't even be shown here, in my view. We answer them with code, they don't understand it, and a day later they're back asking how to fix the code you already gave them to do something else. Somewhere out there I bet there's an app consisting solely of code from SO answers. We should be answering some of them with links to online tutorials instead, I think, and gently pushing them to learn the basics first.

However, I feel that the repeated comments to people about their low accept rate is getting a bit aggressive.

Answer 3

Is aggressive commenting and down-voting and closing of (perhaps badly phrased but) relevant questions considered acceptable behavior on SO?

No, and when you see that behavior you should flag it for moderator attention.

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Regarding the specific question mentioned:

In the instance you link, they are not downvoting the user, they are downvoting the question.

There isn't enough information to answer it, and thus the question itself is a bad egg in the SO google search results - and other users will come by searching for that error, find that SO sucks because it doesn't help them, and look elsewhere.

The question should be closed (and eventually deleted) as "not a real question" since the author has not improved his question, despite requests for specific pieces of information.

In fact, it's rare for people to associate a particular user with "this person is bad and should be downvoted" - there are thousands of questions posted to the site each day, and people rarely look at the user name and icon anyway. This is just another of the dozens of bad questions that end up on the site each day. Beyond that, there are 5 "ibrahim"'s on the site, and many more people with ibrahim in there name, so if someone really was keeping a list of users they downvote as a rule, they'd have to a lot more work to make sure it's the same person.

So if your question is about "the community reaction to bad users" then you need a better example of what you mean by 'bad user' and demonstrate that there's a problem. Otherwise it appears that it's working as designed.