If the goal is to help people, maybe the gods could make it possible for the topic starter to mark a thread as "answered" or "unanswered"

Now I'm sure the argument against this would be that the topic starter would need to mark the thread as "answered" when they get a responce which is somthing they're unlikely to do. That may be the case with one time posters, but I think most will be able to handle that. It should be easy enought to enable a search on this new field as well as allow you to screen out posts with low repuataions or posts by monks with low reputations.

That's just my random though for the day.