Maybe another take on the idea could be to allow anyone to join who could sign in a with a github account that had had at least one accepted pull request on any repository. Easily hacked I guess, but perhaps that would solve the "just Javascript" problem while still serving to boost the average level of tech cred of submitters/commenters.
Surely there would be a way to check this through github's api once there was a username to check against. It sounds like a good idea and it might encourage supporting open source software while avoiding those issues.
But then I guess the downside would be fewer people contributing to your own site.
