This has been annoying me for a while. It seems that of late every second node is being frontpaged. For example in the last 24 hours 12 of 27 SOPW have hit the Front Page. It used to be that a few (like 1-3) carefully selected nodes a day would hit the front page, now it is effectively just another Newest nodes, and as such has become a waste of space IMHO.

I would be interested if anyone wanted to pull some stats but my empirical observation is that there are a handful of rather enthusiastic front paging monks. I personally wish they would pull their heads in a use a little more thought/judgement/discretion.

Some time ago monks were prevented from Front Paging their own nodes as this was felt be be a form of XP abuse. IMHO a new abuse trend is to reply to a node, and then Front Page it, which has a similar effect.

I feel that front page nodes should be limited in number, certainly 50% of the daily node take seems excessive. Suggestions would be to move the power from ?level 5 or wherever it is to a higher level to limit the number of monks that can do it. I would suggest saint level actually as there are plenty of saints now and the desire to accumulate XP drops of at this level. This is also probably easiest to implement. Another option would be to issue FP chits like votes, at a rate of say 1 a week. Once you have front paged one node and spent your chit that is it for the next quanta of time.

While I am on the feature requests and Front Page topic it would look a lot better if it was more blog like ie: heading, brief description, readmore. If you made the front pager write the description as the price of front paging a node, and limited it to 160 chars and deducted 1 XP for every char the description went over length...... ;-)