In the short time that I have been involved with the Monastery, I have started to get a glimps at how the Everything Engine operates. I have buried myself in the bowels of it jumping from one node to the next, until sudden I realize that I have lost all recollection of my orginal intent:)

Observations

• Some of the most talented people frequently dwell here, and I feel privileged to gain from their experinces.
• Its an RPG not a message board, the message board is the side effect. Competition is what is at the heart of this system. Don't get me wrong I love the system, but I see a few areas of weakness:
• Its a race to reply! People want those rep. points, yes the questions do get answered but it doesn't always seem to be as complete as they should.
• Some people seem to time there post for maximum points
• With the frenzy of questions and responses it seems that the Review and tutorial sections get largely ignored. I would have thought with this user base those sections would be much bigger. Then I realized that its much more effort to write one good post as oppose to a few quick ok ones.

Suggestions

• Put more focus on the reviews and tutorial sections, these core sections are easy to navigate and don't get lost in new postings
  • I feel that we should make each vote in these sections count as 2 reputation points as this would encourage people to contribute to our information library. At the same time focuses atention on accuracy and detail, by allowing the same vote to also count as -2, I would be willing to bet that we would get more detailed and higher quality reviews, and more of them.
• Encourage competition in a good way, not in the fight for the fastest click
• We should try and establish monthly or weekly game competitions, similar to ones done by TPJ. If a user submits a running program to the contest give them 5XP. Have multiple divisions(monks vs monks) and award XP for the winners. This would give us the "True" direct competition that most of us desire.