First off, thank you, castaway, for taking the time to consider my request in depth. I would say that it would take something like a voting system to get a node into the Tough Questions section, although I find it hard enough to use up my votes as it is so I would understand hesitancy. ;-D

Perhaps, if a node gets four ticks by users who are Abbots and up, including the OP? And, if a node does get ticked, there's a list of them somewhere to alert others to upvote or downvote the tick count.

On the second concept, I would suggest a 1 to 5 score, where 5 means 'need more help!' This counter would degrade to zero over the course of a few days unless the OP keeps pushing it up. Then, a page such as Recently Active would have a little hotspot indicator on it with shades of red to attract interest. This counter could be squelched by any Abbot-and-up Monk to keep nuisances from abusing us.

Does this sound plausible? PM gets a goodly amount of traffic, and, certainly, adding counters to every single node has to have much benefit to be worth the overhead and storage.

If I have erred on the side of silly, I will gladly recite 3000 Wallexps and cover my head in ashes donated by the blessed merlyn.