What's with all the rude comments recently?

Completely agree. I had edited a question the other day, only to find when I had done editing it, a user had commented, "What's the question?" The OP had replied, "Your ugly face." I don't really get attitudes like that.

Moreover, I've seen an influx of users who are now guessing as answers. "Well, I don't know, but it may be ." It's rather aggravating, to say the least.

Have we hit the critical mass where we're now just bringing 4chan frequenters, or something to that effect? Because I'm with you, we've lost a lot of civility 'round these parts. The best we can do is just flag comments and downvote answers/questions, and hope for the best.

Jerks aren't welcome here!

The fact that one thinks a question (or answer) is horrible, incorrect or useless does not provide an excuse for insults or rudeness. Ad-hominems and insults have no place here; they are unprofessional and reveal only the lack of maturity of the person posting the nastiness. Feel free to ignore a question, fix it, make suggestions, or vote it down, but leave the nastiness for MTV.

I would like to see a reputation penalty assessed by the moderators for rudeness, ad-hominem statements, insults, offensive behavior, and a lack of civility. I would like to see accounts suspended or removed if the behavior continues.

Flag them. I haven't seen any moderator flags highlighting such comments, but I don't mind getting my hands dirty destroying comments and/or users (where necessary). We've suspended and/or kicked people in the past for abusive behaviour, and I can't see that changing any time...

I agree with you. What I especially can't abide is rudeness to folks for whom English isn't their first language. Why not just spend time tidying the question instead of moaning about it and generally being an arse in the comments.

Also there's a lot of folk out there who just aren't pre-disposed to writing good questions. It's our job to help these folks and edit their questions into better shape instead of bumping our gums and filling the comments with pointless attacks on the OP.

In all honesty, if I were the SO Czar, any consistent (like 2 or 3) commenting like this would be grounds for instant banning. I'm more of a zero-tolerance type of guy. If you're being playful, that's another issue. If you're just being rude for no reason, you don't deserve to have a voice. All I could suggest is to flag the comments - that's what I do. I wish I could downvote, vote-to-delete, or edit comments.

As I have been watching various social web sites, as the user number grows, more morons come. This is, sadly, inevitable. In addition, I am afraid we will need some system-level solution or more moderators’ effort (maybe increase number of moderators?).

Having a look at the samples I find it interesting that the commenters rarely have high reputation or have themselves asked some really mudane questions. I have noticed a trend of "Google it first" members appearing more and more often, and we have these on Stack Overflow at the moment as well.

Personally I think the fact that Google is the Stack Overflow homepage is missed by many and the reality is that unless you're part of the beta groups, and know Jeff and Joel and the history of the Trilogy, you will not understand why Stack Overflow exists, and the more people become members the more these problems will occur.

The moderators are there to deal with these, make use of them. People seems afraid to make use of the flags that have been made available. There is quite a bit that can be done by the moderators to deal with users like these without upsetting the whole community.

As people have said, just flag any comment or answer you find offensive. All of the mods have a serious and dedicated side to them about keeping this site organized and well maintained. They do spend a chunk of their free time on this site. This doesn't mean though they don't like to have fun, but they do realize when people are serious.

On meta, things are a little more laid back though.

At some point, this is to be expected and perfectly in line with John Gabriel's Greater Internet F***wad Theory. I think that also elitism plays a role. Sure, for most people, the meaning of an SDK is obvious, or what a database is. I mean, I guess that a question like "What does SDK mean?" is like asking "What does house mean?". Also, there are these continuing questions about what type of questions should be on Stack Overflow.

Luckily, we know the stance of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky on this, and that is: We want everything that's programming related, no matter how simple (listen to Joel in the podcasts).

And so this continues. I never expected rude comments from this community and it's the first questions I've asked here in a long time.

When a user has a comment of his flagged as offensive, and it subsequently gets mod deleted, then that user has commenting privileges suspended for a short amount of time.