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.
--Chris
e-mail jcwren