Rating systems always seem to skew toward the popular kids, informational forum systems such as this one shouldn't be a popularity contest. It's about the posts you read not the posts you make in a lot of cases. I could ask questions all day instead of hitting the search button and I would eventually have thousands of posts that may never be voted upon. The voting system being there doesn't mean people use it every time, they may just view and move along leaving my rating somewhere near neutral and hard to adjust. The me being the malevolent question posting noob could vote down the replying person that simply says RTFM everytime i ask. Get a couple people that don't have the fan boy following and suddenly Sam Deathwalker's oddly guided posts disappear as he gets banned for not being "cool" enough to post. Every forum visited that has a ranking system I usually search around for the "display all posts" and make up my own mind about the posters. If I don't like someone I realize that that is my opinion and I let others make up their own mind.

So what I suggest is a personal per user type cool people list...friend list maybe. You could add people you find to be informative to your list, then filter threads based on people you want to see information from. Leaving the join date and removing the post count gives people an idea of who's been around for a while without immediatly scewing your view of them. I vote something other than a ranking system, though I found many of the suggested titles/ranks amusing.