I agree. I stopped showing those images nearly a decade ago. :)

Unfortunately, I'm not volunteering to facilitate such a competition (it clearly falls in priority below other items I am actively working on related to the site and not finding enough time for).

If somebody can come up with the feasible and fair method for such questing, that would be cool. Most things that manage to work with PerlMonks are things that the members can do by themselves via some form of consensus and that can get implemented (which means something that somebody already familiar with the quirky development of PerlMonks can implement or that can be implemented off-site) and don't require non-trivial on-going administrative actions.

I suspect that the addition of a winning image will not be automated and so will still be an administrative task, but that would likely be okay since it won't be a frequent task and can probably be made somewhat automated.

Also, proposing a PerlMonks thread with replies that get voted on is not a good idea. Threads with huge numbers of direct or near-direct replies have not yet been made reasonable performance-wise.

We tried to ask for perl action shots once, but nobody sent any.

Okay, I think if we got 10 new images added; then it would probably take less than 99% of the perl-monk community. Nevertheless Occupty Top Right sounds like an excellent campaign name :)

I was thinking that they should use an algogrithm that accounts for each monks XP in addition to how much they spend logged on. So that someone like ikegami, Corion, and the other monks who have high XP and are here logged in frequently, would get a few more cycles, than some new monk who just signed up. A little loaded lottery pool of images could than be made, and random images could be pulled from the pool as each page is sent out.

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

STOP SPECIESISM. OCTOPI TOP RIGHT!

Regarding the implementation of monkpics....

Please refer to Land of Monks and Honey. The first seven images (up through "Ad-Meister") are "system" monk pics, and the other six are "user" monk pics.
Currently the site will, 85% of the time, choose one of the seven "system" monk images, and 15% of the time choose one of the "user" monk images.
I think we can agree that all of these pics suck equally.

I would propose that we ditch the distinction between "system" and "user" monk pics.

As for how to build the new set of monk pics, I would propose that we simply allow all monks of some minimum level (e.g. Level 13: Curate) to submit one pic to the gods for inclusion in the rotation. Aside from the gods having the obvious right of refusal, all pics would simply be admitted, without the complexities of discussion or voting.

I'm not sure which of the gods you think relishes the thought of becoming the judge in a little dog show of no real import. For the record, I do not.

If this sounds like a fun or trivial activity, then I suggest you declare yourself the sole collector and arbiter of inclusion-worthy pictures from members above level $X and then you can batch up the requests after you've determined the ones worth including, the ones in an acceptable format, of the right size, from a person of sufficient level, and where enough time has passed that you are reasonably sure that the submitter is not soon going to change their mind.

Please also file a patch to have said images link to message outbox addressed to you in case there are issues to be reported with any of them.

Thanks. :)

- tye        

a little dog show of no real import

Right, except that they do act as a sort of advertisement for PerlMonks. One of the criteria for acceptance would be that the image is suitable for that purpose.

I suggest you declare yourself the sole collector and arbiter

Thank you, I accept. ;-)
However, we should probably obtain some kind of consensus that even this is an acceptable way to proceed.

have said images link to message outbox addressed to you

Er, no; I think it's fine for the monkpics to continue to link where they do now, namely Land of Monks and Honey. We can add a message and link to that node, explaining what one should do (e.g. /msg pmdev) in the event of problems.

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

Like I mentioned in a reply above, I believe the main problem here is not how you choose among the pictures, but to get users to submit any pictures. So in this reply, I propose a scheme to motivate people to submit new action shots we can use.

Some people here occasionally complain that we should make PerlMonks more "modern" and "web 2.0 compatible". They ask for ajax-based voting and chatterbox nodelets and other shiny stuff. Let's pretend we buy into that and introduce avatar images.

This seems "modern", for all the popular forum websites are doing it. For the more conservative monks who won't like it we'll tell we find the idea suitable for a perl programming style as CPAN search already shows the avatar of module owners for each module (never mind that that's just one image per page), and that they can disable it in their settings anyway.

So, monks would be given the ability to upload an avatar image, and this image is shown on the left of each post of that monk. This would work similarly to homenode images, but would be much more prominent, for you'd see a lot of them in long threads. The images would of course be limited to smaller dimensions, say 50 x 60 pixels. (We'll also have to decide whether animated GIFs are accepted.) Obviously displaying the avatars in threads would have to be enabled by default, both for old and new users, to get lots of views.

We would, however, place some disclaimer somewhere in the PerlMonks FAQ that by posting an avatar image, you irrevocably give PerlMonks the right to use that image as a monkpic. We don't even have to hide this in particular, nobody reads instructions anyway.

So then, after, say, two months of putting up with this nonsense, we just swipe the best avatars and install them as monkpics. We then finally disable the avatar feature forever and revert the site to look good.

There are two further ways to enchance this scheme. Firstly, we promise a few XP to the owners of three best images. Not much, just some insignificant reward, like 10 XP for three users each. This is the same ploy as marketing people use when they need free photos of smiling babies for the new bulletin board ads of some product. They hold a "photo contest", give small cash reward to the three parents sending in the best photos; but keep all the hundreds of photos they've received for themselves, for the contestants have signed away all rights to the photos for free when they've sent them in. The second enhancement is to add a default avatar for each user. This is done on many popular websites, so we can claim we're just following the fashion and that it's required to be "web 2.0 compliant". We make the default avatars horrible enough that people want to replace them quickly. If possible, make them varied enough that it's not always obvious which avatars are default and which are user-submitted, thus urging users to replace them even more lest others think they've uploaded that horrible avatar that is in reality a default image randomly supplied by the website.