Here's an idea for a raking system (assuming we are talking custom programming as a viable option):

For each post you make you gain a one rating action point, which doesn't affect your forum rank at all, but this keeps people who don't participate at all from getting votes.

Then with these earned points you can chose to act upon someone else's forum rating level Up or Down by one per person per day.

So if I always say useful/helpful things, more people will give me +1 rating points, esp. likely from the person who posted a question that I answered, since they got a rating point to give from creating their post already anyway.

And if I always flame or say dumb things, more people will -1 from my rating all the time and I'll end up going very negative.

Then just make up names for the scale from say -5000 to +5000 (weighted to more values in the proximity to 0 since most people probably won't go more than +/- 200 either direction.


And then give users the option to grey out replies from people below a negative value of their choosing between say -10 (no tolerance for any slips) and -infinity (the patience of Job).