I think they should be on but they shouldn't be available to just people who are starting out within the community here. Maybe they could be used as a way to gauge a persons hacking abaility or helpfulness? Like Idea1 you could turn it on only for the hacking section and only for the first post in the thread. So we could gauge the hacker and how much people like the person. Another idea would be to give 'reputation' when a person is helpful maybe we could have a staff member dedicated to doing this for the forums and the rest of the staff could help out?
Well that's my two pence but I think it should be turned on