What is the ideal way to respond 'Community user' pokes?

Question

I see most of pokes of community user what is the best way:-

Answer them a fresh??

Vote up the correct answer?

edit and vote up the answer?

improve the question quality and voteup question?

Answer 1

All of those things!

The Community user, as it sounds like you know, bumps questions with no positive scoring answers. That's not really any indication about the existing content, or what it needs. It's just a script that runs to surface some old content and give it a chance. You really have to judge each question individually.

Think of bumped questions as just meaning "this question didn't get enough attention yet." As a feature of the Stack Exchange model, questions tend to stay valid for a long, long time. Whether a question is new or not doesn't generally affect how it's handled, particularly here on Ask Patents, where our scope has remained more or less consistent for a while now.

As such, just treat it as you would any other.

If you see a good answer, upvote it. If there isn't a good answer and you'd like to post one, go for it.

If the question is good, upvote it. If not, try and edit it, downvote, and/or maybe even close it.

In general, if you see something that deserves an edit, you should go ahead and do that. Again, that's true on new and old posts alike. So if there's a low-quality answer (a link-only one, for example) and you'd like to edit it to be a bit better, that will certainly be appreciated.