Personally, I'm a bit concerned about a forum for an open source, freely available game where new members couldn't post unique questions, which for other projects that maybe don't attract such a young group

is a common reason why people even set up users. Perhaps allowing them to post to stickies could work, but the mods would have to modify that pretty heavily to keep them readable. Lets face it, someone looking for a solution who doesn't search for it certainly isn't gonna read through a 25 page thread concerning their error. and getting posts on five different threads about "CAN I HAS TREM SREVER?!" is, in my mind, more disturbing than seeing a thread started about it. Not to mention that someone who is gonna start a dumb ass thread is not likely to post their questions in the correct threads to begin with.
Just this second it occurred to me to have a seperate, knowledge base type section where topics could not be started, but threads could be moved to if they are particularly useful in solving a specific problem. Perhaps a subforum of troubleshooting. Hmm, I'll have to think how that would work long term before I decide to bug higher ups about whether or not to try it.
On a side note, the one of modified karma, I respectfully submit
this. Apparently his original post was quite offensive to someone, or a friend of someone, who has root access to the db.

I wanna say his karma started around -999, though if I remember correctly it was pretty negative to begin with, in the range of -20 to -40.