Possibly. But I'd rather seem something like a "Hall Of Fame". Any node with a rep higher than say 200 would automatically be added to a special "Hall Of Fame YYYY" node and removed from the "Best nodes". One "Hall Of Fame YYYY" node would exist for each year, with maybe an index node to list all of the years. And such "Hall of Fame YYYY" node would not list by reputation, but by order of publication.

Liz

200 feels artificial. Over time the meaning of "200" has changed as the number of potential voters has increased.

However I would like to see your proposals combined. I think that there is value in adding to the current hall of fame say the best nodes of the last month and last year. And further it would be nice to be able to go back and look at the Hall of Fame at any given week in the past.

The value of that was brought home to me this Christmas when I first was busy and behind on PM, and then took over a week vacation. There is no way that I could reasonably skim the backlog, and I can't use "Best Nodes" to sample interesting conversations missed if I missed them by more than a week.

I think that the site has grown to a point where a more intelligent "browsable interesting history" is worthwhile.

200 feels artificial. Over time the meaning of "200" has changed as the number of potential voters has increased.

Maybe something like this. At the beginning of the year, look ar the rep of the 10 hignest nodes that were posted in the previous year and use the lowest score of that top 10 as the cut-off point.

And further it would be nice to be able to go back and look at the Hall of Fame at any given week in the past.

Would be nice, but I'm afraid rather impossible with the current database setup, as that doesn't keep when votes were given (as far as I know).

Liz

I've found that authorship is a much better indicator of quality of a post than the XP rating. I believe this is a general failure of all everaging methods (slashdot karma is another example of this), and I feel that the promise of recently hyped Social Networking Software is really to localize the reputation computation to the subnet of your choosen friends.

The first, being that reputation would likely be the only viable method for establishing placement into the category. We have all seen nodes that contain very little of substance that otherwise get a reputation boost either based on a witty comment, the author's status, or simply by being on the frontpage. While they may have been good posts worthy of the reputation earned, I hazard to guess that is not what many of us are envisioning as 'best nodes'...perhaps like the XP system, the good would generally rise to the top most of the time and this could be acceptable.

Second, I wonder how a nodes placement into such a 'best nodes' category would artificially affect the reputation of that node? We already have many who push all their votes on the frontpaged nodes in an attempt to use up their votes and gain some XP. I suspect a 'best-nodes' section could end up being used in a similar manner....this might be alleviated by not being able to vote on the nodes listed in the section but requiring the user to click on the node and bring the entire thread up before voting.

Of course, I still like the concept, but I think it needs some thought in order to be done properly.

You'll find that Best Nodes (and Worst Nodes) already exist. If I have any serious concern about them, it's the number of items listed.

Makeshifts last the longest.