I'm thinking about a script that, for want of a better term, I would call a proxybot. It would have a front-end that would let you read threads in the monastery. In the space of a couple of hours, you could read literally hundreds of nodes, all the while giving them your most careful consideration. Each node you would ++ or -- according to how you felt about it. Hole up for a weekend and you could probably make a fair stab at digesting all of the Meditations section.

Thus, you would have an enormous list of nodes to vote on, and they would be your considered opinions, not just -- because $author eq 'merlyn'. The proxybot would then process this list in a cron-job, an hour before vote o'clock, spending any remaining unused votes on reducing the list.

I don't see this as being particularly unethical. I do think it is pretty stupid, because a single good timely response to a node, or a good meditation, will garner you more XP than a month's voting will bring you. But hey, some people will do anything to claw ahead. (Sometimes I feel embarrassed at having more XP than some other people, such as Petruchio, a monk with janitor status who has janitored for me on more than one occasion).

g r i n d e r