Well, I give you a ++ for making the effort to make a positive contribution. But I'm afraid that personally I'd have to give your idea a --

Basically what we are talking about here is a popularity contest. And I don't think popularity contests do anybody any good. For every monk that gets a momentary warm fuzzy feeling after having been voted/appointed/selected as "monk of the month", you'll have dozens more with their noses out of joint thinking "hrmph, what did she do to deserve that?", "I made twice as many posts as him", "my answer in thread XYZ was ten times better than his", etc, etc.

Besides that, there is also the logistics of implementing something like this. I mean - supposedly this would mean an additional poll every month. Then you have stuff like collecting and collating nominations, deciding what constitutes a valid nomination, etc, etc, etc. All this I think just distracts from what Perl Monks is all about - which as best as I can work out is - discussing Perl and things related to Perl.

Whilst I generally agree with the principle of positive recognition in order to encourage achievement, I do think that what we already have in place gives people enough recognition here at Perl Monks.

And as far as "repaying what may have gone unrecognised" goes. Speaking for myself, I can honestly say that I have taken much more from Perl Monks in the short time that I have been here, than I could ever give back. And I wouldn't be surprised if many other monks felt the same way.

Cheers,
Darren :)