Maybe I call it a silly game? Its about participation not node reputation...

Hm. If it's just about participation; let the spammers in, they'll participate this place to death.

(IMO) If XP serves any purpose at all, it is to record our peers response to our participation. A measure not of us as individuals; nor as programmers per se; nor Perl gurus; but a measure of others appreciation of the time expended to help others; to produce original, or interesting content; and yes. Participate.

I'm aware of the fairy votes and attendance votes intended to encourage initial participation; but they cut off at some pretty low level. After that it should be down to votes. But that, like so much else here, is not just set in stone; but fossilised.

Once reminded by tye's (non)link, I (very) vaguely remember reading about $NORM -- possibly 13 years ago, maybe a little later -- and thinking that's shite, but house rules; and I've probably never considered it again until last night.

I was following chacham's thread; lanX' bit about guessing other peoples node scores and logarithmic scales; and thought a summary of my score distribution might be useful; so I posted it. When I saw the disparity between my summed total and the official XP tally I was taken aback. (I actually summed the score/count pairs manually on a calculator to check I hadn't done something stupid in my code that wasn't jumping out at me.) I remembered that XP != votes -- though not the details, so I asked.

And, had Tye's (or anyone's) reply been "Did you forget about Voting/Experience System"?; my response would almost certainly have been a simple: "Yes. That suck's, but c'est la vie", and moved on.

But when the response is a non-answer dripping with supercilious sarcasm and YetAnotherCharacterAttack; it gets my back up; so this continued thread is the response.