Extend user karma/points system to drupal support queues

Hey all,

I had an idea which I hope is fairly novel. I'm really hoping that this gets around so some of the drupal bigwigs can chime in as to what they think.

Drupal is the worlds best open source CMS. Fact. It succeeds in the places all other CMS's fail, with the exception of the support queues, in which it suffers the same fate that all other CMS's and support forums share: apathy. The fact that we have the number of responses in queues that we do now is astounding to me. The apathy is understandable as well. We all had to (generally) learn the hard way, one way or another, and when some new guy comes online and asks an obvious question without searching, we ignore his comment and figure if he's smart he'll figure it out one way or another.

This might be a good way to punish users too lazy to search, but it does not help drupal grow. I've been on forums for many years, and forum users on any forum are notorious for ignoring questions/refusing to help/etc/etc, primarily because it's a thankless job. You might spend 20 minutes answering a question, only to have someone you'll never see write you (maybe) a one line 'thank you!,' and thats it.

I think we should change that. My proposal is to institute user karma/rep/points to reward users who answer support threads, and more importantly, answer WELL. Experts Exchange (http://www.experts-exchange.com/) does this job incredibly well. Users who answer the most questions well could win things, such as a gift certificate, free/discounted trip to drupalcon, reputation, respect, etc, etc, etc.

This provides the necessary motivation for users to actually care about responding to other user's support issues. It makes people care enough to spend the time to write the detailed, necessary responses. Users could vote on the quality of the response, and thus increase the 'reputation' or karma, etc, of the responding user. Moreover, module maintainers could also benefit from this system, as their quick action could gain them points/karma/free tickets to drupalcon/gift certificates/etc. A $50 gift certificate to amazon.com or another place is a big motivator for people to go the extra mile. (Drupal receives funding from multiple sources, a few hundred dollars in gift certificates shouldn't bankrupt the project by any means)

In short, the results from this, in my opinion, would be nothing short of monumental. It would dramatically decrease the learning curve necessary to learn drupal, bringing more people on the platform because drupal support queues would be known for providing the answers people need. It would encourage more developers to learn drupal's API and interface for the same reason. More companies would use drupal for the same reason, and the increased use would give more business to people like us who build drupal websites commercially.

I think it's a good idea that has little startup cost but comes with a solid benefit.

Thoughts?