I've been thinking about the whole XP system, and it is geared toward having monks participate -- mostly in the form of voting.

Before discussing how this should be changed, I'd ask why we even have monk levels. Currently, it pretty much only has to do with seniority -- that is, time on the site voting and posting. It has little to nothing to do with quality of posts (although you can rise more rapidly with consistent ++ voting). It also says very little about the quality of knowledge about perl. To me, the level system never did say these things.

The question remains, is this acceptable? What do we want the levels to say? I like the idea of a thesis as suggested by another post. When it gets time for you to level up, you must complete some sort of task, complete a mantra, quest... a step on a 12 fold path to sainthood, if you will. This may start out as just a quality post (moderated to something like 10 or so) for level 2, making a (good) code contribution for level 3, or perhaps making a new FAQ for monk level. Sainthood might be reserved for doing something a bit more advanced, such as writing your own perl book (i.e., merlyn).

Improving the XP/level system is important. I think doing something such as this would improve the site and give real meaning to the levels.

--shendal