When you ask, 'Why is XP-Whoring Bad?' I think we have to get down to a definition pretty quickly. XP-whoring is not, to me, when you write a non-code post. And if having people upvote your posts makes you happy, that's wonderful. I don't think there's any necessary relationship between XP-whoring and feeling happy or welcome. Indeed, if PerlMonks makes you happy, and you're learning by the 'metric assload', that's a victory for PerlMonks. I wish everyone the same.

XP-whoring, to me, is when you do things simply, or mostly, for the XP you hope to get. That is not, I think, something which is conductive to the health of our community.

Now that's pretty hard to measure; only you really know why you do what you do. And yet, our prosperity as a community depends, more than anything else, on the attitudes our citizens carry with them.

Anyone here can vote randomly, just to get the XP, nobody will know but them. You can quietly help degrade the voting system, and you'll win. Only the community will lose.

Likewise, what is accomplished when a person begs for votes in the Chatterbox, because they've only got a few points until some level? Should such a person feel good about those votes? That's not a matter of someone saying 'thank you' or 'good job' for your post; it's giving a handout to a mooch. How does doing this help the community?

Or pointing out, in the chatterbox, something you've written. Do you think it's germaine to the conversation, and likely to be interesting to the others? Or are you airing the equivalent of annoying advertisements? In my opinion, the distinction is important.

I could go on in this vein, but I hope it's not necessary. It's not enough that you feel happy and welcome here, and that you learn things. It's important that others do too; whether they will depends, in part, on you. If you're doing what you do for others, as well as yourself, you're not an XP-whore.

Just take things in moderation. Enjoy your XP, sure, but keep your priorities straight. Hopefully you already do. If your actions make people feel welcome and help them learn, I wish you a metric assload of XP.

$xp != $perl_ability;
# This is not a bad thing...
[download]

Every language needs articulate advocates. Speaking as an self taught, self styled neophyte, my communication skills are a lot stronger than my perl skills (not that that's saying much). Contribute what you can, whether it be experience, humour, ideas, algorithms.

If people are prepared to spend posting interesting ideas, then I don't care what their motive is. If people enjoy XP, even more the better.

XP Whoring is bad if...

If we get too much crap 'one liners' then that is a filtering problem but I don't think there's too much of that happening, and if it does judicious -- should fix it.

If we get the Slashdot signal to noise ratio.

If we piss off the experienced monks who put a lot of effort into answering questions and helping the acolytes. I'm constantly amazed at the time these people put in, and the level of expertise.

If we lose focus.

All subjective of course, one monks xp whoring is another's inspiration.

"The future will be better tomorrow."

Another issue I have with some Xp-Whores is that they rely way too much on the TMTOWTDI idea in the SoPW area. While it is very good to expose perl newbies that there are different ways to do things, they only need to be exposed to a few of the better ways. In general SoPW works very well with the TMTOWTDI idea, newer members of perlmonks post their ideas on how to do it, and then the more experienced members help to refine those ways. This allows everyone to learn more about perl, and to become better programmers. Sometimes you'll see a post later in the discussion that ignores any discussion previous to it, and shows another way to do it, one that may not be very good for any number of reasons.

Finally, I think that some people Xp-whore too soon after joining, the monastery. They haven't seen some of the advice that's given again and again, and they don't know some of the common answers that are generally accepted in the monastery. For example, a new Initiate trying to Xp-whore might respond to a question about parsing a query string with a method they thought of as opposed to pointing to a node like use CGI or die;. Which although not original, is much better advice. Plus using references to other nodes is a great Xp-whoring tip ^_^

The way to Xp-Whore is to post often, post well, and post things that show that you are trying or at least will make others think, like YAXpD by azatoth, hint hint, nudge nudge. Basically there is little difference between posting and good Xp-Whoring, the only difference is that bad Xp-Whoring is posting anything at all to try and get votes.

That's it for my opinion, sorry if parts of this make no sense, or are disjointed, as I have yet to have coffee, and have to keep doing bits of work, which de-rail my train of thought. So if anything is wrong, or doesn't make sense, or is just really stupid, please /msg me, or reply to this.

-xPhase

An excess of XP-Whoring means more time is spent talking about the voting system than talking about Perl. I've got no problem with that -- this is a "Perl community", the second word's as important as the first. Everyone who ever spent quality time here has the potential to go on to found their own community, so avoiding discussion on sociotechnological phenomenons like "trolls", "karma/XP-whoring", and "reaping" is short-sighted.

My view is that hacking a social system is as good for said system as hacking a poorly secured box -- short-term bad, long-tem good. Anyone who XP-whores PM merely for XP is no better than a cracker stealing cc #s, while the people poking at the system trying to find new ways to get XP are XP-Hackers.

e-mail neshura

Now here's a website focused on perl, with a voting system that didn't always exist. People post here in order to learn, teach and also to provide their peers with a certain kind of browsing experience, focused on perl and enlightening (or something, something good). Xp and rep are just reflections of the information generating perl centered activity, like money, and it's somewhat taboo to exchange the activity explicitly and specifically for xp. Even though it's normal to receive xp for the activity!

So to answer then question Why is Xp-Whoring Bad?

It shifts the focus of the site by shifting the reason for participating.
It puts the cart before the horse.