I didn't catch the thread you referenced, but I've seen enough of those behaviors to appreciate the challenge! I'll add a few miscellaneous thoughts - none of which excuse bad behavior on the part of the poster, but might help to bucket them and evolve a strategy for dealing with them.

First, I wonder how often those "bad" posters are just agents of anarchy, those who just enjoy starting a fight in which they really have no interest in winning, just prolonging. I've long made it a practice to just disengage if I have any sense the the person isn't real in any aspect.

Related to these are the ones that have all the signs of having been run through a translation engine - nothing wrong with not having English as a language, but things do get lost in the translation.

Next, most people are pretty shy about posting their first question, and shyness often leads to awkwardness, especially if it wasn't an especially good question. I'd bet those who post more questions later or those that end up answering questions probably had a great first experience.

One behavior I saw recently at a Code Camp was someone wanting behavior from a product based on what seemed to be at first listen fairly absurd constraints. The speaker clearly thought so too, and tried to answer and then move on - because it was a hard problem either way, convince them to remove constraints or truly figure out a work around, but the person kept insisting on more, more. It wasn't that the person came across as bad, more of a frustration of "I know you can answer this and you're the expert, tell me!"

Food for thought on those answering posts - one of my sayings is that "you have to be in the right place in life to lesson some lessons", and after you've learned your own, it's often hard to be patient with those that havent.

I rarely participate in the daily conversations due to other demands on my time these days, but I still appreciate the ongoing and ever changing cast that does so much of the work in forums - I still send people here because I know they are highly likely to both get an answer and to be treated well. I'd hate to see that change because of a few knuckleheads (or a few more knuckleheads than a year ago), and sometimes that may require Steve to be the bad guy with those that won't try to work within the system. For those of you participating in the threads, I say give them what you can, but don't let them ruin it for you, and sometimes that will mean just unsubscribing.

Steve, on a side note, it would be really interesting to see if you can't find a way to identify/flag what those posts/posters might have in common. Are they all first time posters? All from the same geographic area? Poor grammar? Probably more subtle.