Does anyone else go through the monk stats by jcwren and look for people that are on the edge of the next level and comb there posts for something that is worth voting for? I've spent a number of votes this way trying to bump people up because it's just such a good feeling to cross levels.

Is this a good or bad practice, assuming that I am not spending my votes haphazardly?

-OzzyOsbourne

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Monk 'Em Up
by turnstep (Parson) on Oct 16, 2000 at 20:16 UTC

    I would call it mostly harmless. As long as you are still going by the content and quality of the posts, and not by who wrote them, how you generate your list of posts to possibly rate should not matter. However, I might also label this as a little on the "bad practice" camp, as you will probably have some natural bias and will not evaluate the posts the same as if you had just wandered across them, no matter how hard you try. IMO, the author of the report should never affect your voting - vote the post, not the author.

RE: Monk 'Em Up
by Adam (Vicar) on Oct 16, 2000 at 22:49 UTC
    I have a tendancy to do something simillar, so I see no problem with your doing it. I like to go through the older posts and try to find nuggets of truth that I missed the first time. A sort of random approach though, rather then by author.

    If you think about it, you are not introducing any negative effect this way. You can only vote for a post once, regardless of its age, therefor if you find an older post that deserves a ++, by all means vote for it! (And likewise, if you find bad posts, vote them down!) The real bias here would be your choosing to abstain on a node because you want the author to be promoted despite the crummy post. However, as most people here seem to vote ++ or not at all, the bias is negligable.(Compare the rankings of the Best Nodes with those of the Worst Nodes. There is a substantial difference in absolute value.)

    So happy promoting.

RE: Monk 'Em Up
by extremely (Priest) on Oct 17, 2000 at 07:30 UTC

    Sounds to me like you could be biasing on the top posters and not giving the newbies a proper chance.

    Or alternately, most of your votes would be spent on the newbies because the have steps that are closer together and there are lot more of em...

    Now I'm confused. Hmmm, well if you can't read all the posts in a day, it can't be that bad of a practice... =)

    --
    $you = new YOU;
    honk() if $you->love(perl)

RE: Monk 'Em Up
by frankus (Priest) on Oct 17, 2000 at 15:31 UTC
    Cool! Benevolence is a good quality for a Monk, for a good post you are endorsing a statement and validating a Perl monk, if that person is on the cusp of their level, the points they recieve are more poignant.

    This is cool, although I shun the point system (now I've got my photo on my own node :-)Unless there is an overriding decision to the contrary, I will adopt this.

    --
    
    Brother Frankus.
RE: Monk 'Em Up
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 17, 2000 at 00:58 UTC
    It looks like and needs a leg up, if you havn't voted for the one post yet.