It's partly tongue in cheek and partly serious. Allowing Anonymous Monk to have XP could really cause technical difficulties.

I believe that in theory, perlmonks has a setting somewhere that lets the gods ban a monk from moderation. This feature, however, was never tested, because as far as I know, no monk was ever banned from moderation. It's difficult to tell whether it works correctly because the moderation code is in a very ugly state, with parts duplicated in three or four places. There could even be problems with level powers other than moderation and voting, and very likely banning these from anyone was also never tested. (We do have a working system for banning users from voting though.) If there is a bug, that Anonymous Monk could quickly cause a lot of trouble, such as moderating on lots of nodes. If an ordinary monk had such behaviour, the gods could simply lock up their account, whether temporarily or permanently; but with Anonymous Monk this might be difficult or impossible. Fixing such a bug wouldn't be easy either, because none of the gods have much time. Thus, if we wanted to change Anonymous Monk to gain XP, the gods would first have to make a long code audit, and they'd rather spend their time for something more productive.

Sorry.

(As a compromise, we could have Anonymous Monk have zero XP but show up on Monks by Writeup Count. Do you think that would help?)

In reply to Re^3: A Pope-ular decision? by ambrus
in thread A Pope-ular decision? by space_monk

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