Good point.

Some further points:

• We should make votes from higher monks more weighty, and if a monk is above a certain level (monk, for instance), they should be able to see a post and the score of the post before voting to ensure that the post is not getting inflated uneccesarily.
• If the XP based levels ever need to be changed, vroom should probably change the XP for each level by a set percentage, and then increase each existing monk's XP by that same percentage.
• Questions, depending on the level of the monk posting, should be limited to a certain reputation, but higher level monks can vote on a node regardless of reputation of the node.
• Posts in the Snippets, Code, Craft, and Obfuscation nodes should have more bearing on the XP of the poster than questions.

Any other ideas?

J. J. Horner
Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/

jjhorner said:
• We should make votes from higher monks more weighty, and if a monk is above a certain level (monk, for instance), they should be able to see a post and the score of the post before voting to ensure that the post is not getting inflated uneccesarily.

I like this idea. There seems to be a tendency for some people to vote up a post simply because of the reputation of the author -- even if the post was rude, inflammatory or just plain incorrect. Some posts could receive negative votes for similar, non-quality-related reasons. Higher level monks are expected to contribute to the quality of the site and to help regulate the workings of Perl Monks. This would definitely help them fulfill a "balancing" role...

Russ

Russ,



I tend to disagree. Generally speaking, I think the higher level monks tend to make more correct statements more often than less experienced people.

I think the general tendency is for people to vote ++ unless a node is really stupid or inflammatory. Voting ++ doesn't help as butt-kissing since you don't know who voted the node. And there's already a fairly good check in place since you don't know what the reputation is until after you've voted.

In fact, I tend to think that allowing higher level monks to influence the score is a negative thing.

Just my $0.02USD.

--Chris

Somehow I like the idea of black-box-XP, but the problem still remains, there must be a way, obvious, public or cryptic and hidden, to distribute XP.

Maybe a system based on the potential votes would work indeed. Let's keep the XP as they are, and you still get XP for logging in. No XP just for creating a node. XP are then given via the ratio of votes for this post out of the total votes for each day. That would mean, if a post gets (say) 1% of all positive (resp. negative) votes on a day, the user gets 1 XP (resp. loses 1 XP).
This system would be untouched by the number of posts/votes, and the only anomalies would be on really lazy days, where a post that gets one vote already gets 1 XP, but the number of idle days should diminish with the number of active monks.

XP based on percentages don't sound attractive to me, because, when we have 10,000,000 posts a day, percentages will be pretty low. Say, why not calculate the average post's reputation, then derive the number of XPs the user receives based on that?

I think that giving XP on the post reputation is a bad idea, because the average reputation of a post is going up. When I joined Perlmonks (1 month ago?), the Best Nodes were about 15 to 20 points, now we have 60 points. If I think of the last two weeks, the Best Nodes of the week were also more or less the Best Nodes of all time. So I think there is an inflation in votes, as is to be expected by more voters. I also think there will be an inflation of XP, as long as XP is coupled to the raw votes and not somewhat sensible to the total number of votes.

Of course, another argument might be, if we have more voters, we also have more posters and the votes will be somewhat distributed over these nodes, but I think that the number of new nodes dosen't rise in the same way that the number of new voters rises.