I don't care for this idea, for a couple of reasons:

• There is no compelling reasons that votes have to be used. It's not like voting puts money in your bank account. Missing a day voting, and missing a few XP for not voting that day have no real impact on your standing in the monastery. Sure, some people may "get in front of you". So what? There's no reason you should be permitted to play "catch-up" simply because you weren't here. The US government doesn't save your votes for you if you're out of your voting jurisdiction, and don't file an absentee ballot.

• It gives you an incentive, up to a certain level, to come back to the monastery each day. However, once you're above level 5 (I think), you no longer get a voting out bonus. So, at that point, you should only be voting on the merit of the nodes themselves, anyway.

• The monastery is not about XP. Voting simply to get XP is a foolish way to expend your votes. Voting is intended to assign a judgement value to a post (however morally right or wrong you may feel that process is)..

• It allows the ability of someone to seriously hammer one person on a day (for good or for worse). While in the grand scheme of things it will still average out, this keeps any really serious spikes from occuring, by limiting the amount of damage (or good) one monk can do to another..

The site should be a place of enjoyment and education, not an obsession. 10,000 XP and $0.79 will get you a cup of coffee at McDonalds. To date, no one has gotten a job because they 4000+ XP at www.perlmonks.org. Trying to read anything else into XP is simply building a false sense of values. And if you're that bad off, you should probably lay off the PC for a couple of days, and go chase butterflies.

10,000 XP and $0.79 will get you a cup of coffee at McDonalds.

Hey, I'm halfway there! Look out McD's! Here I come!

How many XP do I need to have them spill it in my lap so I can make millions? {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

If it was limited to only a day or two then the downsides wouldn't be too bad.

It could be implemented in a simple fashion by refreshing the votes every two days (rather than every day, as now), and doubling the number of votes you get when that happens.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

Even as a saint now, I'm still able to spend all my votes and find nodes that I'd vote ++ on had I enough votes. I simply put all these nodes below my "regular" nodes into the personal nodelet and get back to them when I have surplus votes.

Rant : I wouldn't want votes to amass. Just like money (or even easier than money), votes are nothing until you spend them, and votes are only there to be spent. I see this partly as some education for the people to learn how to enjoy spending (votes or money), I had to learn that. If people are not here to spend their votes on time, they get stale and rot away (come to think of it, you even have to earn your votes, like money, but unlike money, once you've attained some level, you don't get any less votes because you became lazy).

Eww - sounds pretty weird. But now it's posted. Thanks for listening.