what about a points system for answered queries .

The person who get his/her answer decide on how many points to award for the answer upto a maximuim of 5 points.

more points better rating

0-50 novice
100-150 intermediate


etc

I like the idea of this sort of rep(utation) system. It works really well on a couple of the motorbike forums I'm on.

However the current forum is remotely hosted and as such I can't play with the coding to implement a feature like this :(

There's a possibility of me trying to move the forum to something a bit more hackable, but there's quite a bit of work involved if the current posts/members are not to be lost.