After the radical changes being made to the xp system, -- Which I disagree with. -- I think it might be time to open a more serious forum on revising Anonymous Monks system (AM) which I also think needs improvement.

Reasons for the current system

The reasoning for the current system along with citations are as follows.

Reputation for anonymous monks, 08-DEC-03

1. PodMaster's node The votes per monk shouldn't matter, only the votes per node, so Anonymous or not, the node should receive an equal chance at being voted on.
2. PodMaster's node Users can not see the ++/-- ratio on AM votes until they have casted their own vote because: they might fall victim to peer pressure and have their vote influenced.

Monks with control over Anonymous?, 25-APR-2000

1. Vroom's node He states that Anonymous monks shoulden't receive any xp because they shouldn't have their privledegs upgraded.

Points for revision

Particle brings up a valid point on 04-FEB-02, in anonymous Monks: a double-edged sword in an argument with his node. He states

*i get a little upset that people talk of 'wasting votes' on anonymous monks. wasting votes? what is a wasted vote? if you don't vote on something you should, you're wasting a vote. because there's a not a monk who will have a greater possibility of gaining XP is not a good reason not to vote.

i fear even if an anonymous monk posted something brilliant that added greatly to the community, that post would not make it to best nodes. that's a shame.

This is a valid concern. Now that we have less votes, and the game of climbing the ranks has been revisited, there seems to be more of a reason then ever to deny Anonymous Monks their vote, whether it be an upvote or not.

In this thread Get rid of Anonymous Monks? created on 08-MAY-00 Amanda (whose phone number is ***.***.****) makes an even more radical suggestion in her node AMs grilled, with cheese that we get rid of *all* Anonymous Monks. This seems a little too harsh. Her reasoning is the low quality posts behind Anonymous Monks and what their equivalent has done to the Slashdot community.

Without looking into further posts, I feel that the best way ™ would be to give everyone enough votes to cast a vote to each node they have read. I can see no reason to do otherwise. I spend my 15 some'od votes before the end of the day. And, then at least read some 20 other nodes, that I can't vote on for lack of votes. 90% of the time though I find a node is worthy of a downvote or an upvote. With that said, I have these questions:

The issue

• If I don't have nearly enough XP to vote for all of the nodes I read, then why should I vote at all for an anonymous node?
• XP has the added benefit of telling you how good or thought out the node is, after you say what you thought of it, you get to find out what others have thought of it too, this fails when Monks refrain from voting on anonymous nodes.
• What would be the drawbacks to not counting votes as expended when cast on the Anonymous Monk's nodes? If the user behind the Anonymous Monk, can't take credit for the amount of attained XP. Then what is there lose? The Monks nodes are artificially inflated, so he might have more positive votes on a good node, more negative on a bad node, but it would be a more fair representation of his nodes status.

An idea for improvement

Rather than making a vote cast on an anonymous node count against the users daily vote stipend, what if we allowed all users to cast one vote per anonymously authored node? As in, what if the votes casted on them didn't decrement our votes-remaining count? Anonymous Monks would be held more accountable. Through an option the user could set with the data acquired after their nodes were rated they could be hid for having a subpar xp. It would be like custom node reaping. (This idea is first mentioned by kryten in this node). I should also point out that because the Anonymous Monk has an aggregate of XP earned by all Anonymous Monks (internally and masked as 0) that it has even less of a value than it does to other monks. In addition, the Anonymous Monk doesn't benefit from logging on, and can never receive xp by casting a vote. The point of this being, that with the votes so skewed already for the Anonymous Monk, this would only allow users to better approximate the nodes status. After all, it isn't like the Anonymous Monk is going to be able to spend his votes after he levels up to a new rank. So, now in the game of xp, he is more or less a blackhole. (In that he can't give back)

UPDATE:
Phone number factoid removed by the request of the mighty gods from above, linked to it instead.

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