C.

From BrowserUk's signature:

"Examine what is said, not who speaks."

That's good advice. So would be: "Vote on what is said, not who speaks."

Voting should be a way to express your approval or disapproval of a node's content, not the node's author. Rewarding or punishing the node's author should be seen for what it is: a side-effect. In fact, voting on a node is not guaranteed to change the author's XP anyway.

If you want to show your diapproval of posting anonymously, and you want to do that by withholding your votes, that's fine. There are, however, plenty of people (myself included) that do vote on AM posts. And that's unlikely to change.

By the way, voting based on the author (a.k.a. "personality voting") is frowned upon.

P.S. What's with the phone number? Posting another monk's personal information is a big no-no... I hope she asked you to include her number.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Well said, AM! Your node has my upvote. :)

Then you would have no motivation to be selective about what you upvote. Having a 'shortage' of votes means that something only gets a vote if you choose to spend one of your limited votes on it. Giving everyone enough votes to vote on everything they saw would probably result in every node getting lots of ++ (as people attempt to get xp for spending votes), and the differentiation between outstanding nodes and bad, indifferent or run of the mill nodes would be lost.

This statement seems to be contradictory - the reason folks post anonymously is often that they don't want to be held accountable.

Anonymous Monk isn't one person whom you can control, it is a legion of folks

IMHO, the whole pupose of the voting and experience system is to encourage both personal participation and accountability. If I post things that this community deems inappropriate, then I incur the results of that action.

If a monk posts anonomously something that the community doesn't like, then that monk isn't held accountable because they have decided remain anonymous.

Regarding giving anonymous monk XP, I just don't see the value. Again, XP is meant to encourage participation yet those that post anonymously aren't wanting to particpate in that manner, otherwise they would register and/or post as themselves.

Regarding those who decide to vote or not on anonymous postings, that is their priveledge. There is not steadfast requirement on how one uses their votes here. They have every right to vote as they, not we, feel appropriate.

While your premise is well thought and well stated, I disagree that this is a problem that needs to be solved.

I wildly disagree.
If you think Anonymous Monk is less worthy of your vote than, say Happy the monk, that's ok for me. Just kidding. I think AM deserves every vote I cast on him. I don't think they are wasted, node reputation matters, not only to the poster but also to the readers. Maybe all it needs is an appeal to oneself: AM is one of our cherished users, just as any other (at least most of the time).

ambrus: Oh yes, I keep running out of votes at times when I spend too much time reading PM. But that's allright, it's about the only hint PM gives me to go back to work again.

Cheers, Sören

As others have pointed out there is an important distinction between reputation for a node and XP. I vote on AM nodes if I think they are deserving of an up vote. It's possible I less often down vote AM nodes because some of the reasons I might down vote a node don't apply to AM (to signal to the OP that I object to particuarly bad formatting for example).

I find that the number of votes I have to "spend" is not generally an issue. Some days I rip through them and am dissapointed at the end of the day that I need to wait a couple of hours before I vote on a few deserving nodes. Other days I find I've only spent a few votes.

Really deserving nodes don't go away. Bookmark them in your Personal Nodelet for voting when the vote tide comes in tomorrow. Good nodes are worth re-reading in any case and the bookmarking works quite nicely now (if I may say so myself :)).

One thing that I would like to see would be the ability to case a null vote on a node so that you can then see the node's rep. The null vote wouldn't adjust rep or XP, would cost one vote and would disallow further votes by the caster on that node.

If a node gets high rep, it is allready possible to see what its rep is - look at Best Nodes. There is value in voting AM nodes and, if its a good node, Am can see that it is good.

You have brought up a really good point, one that I hadn't fully considered previously. Like many, I would avoid voting on anonymous nodes on the theory it wouldn't affect anyone's XP. This attitude really missed the whole point of voting, I see now - it's to evaluate the post, not the poster.

I am not sure I agree with you on this - perhaps it's still OK to vote on anonymous nodes to rate the quality of the node. Some people post excellent responses anonymously, for various reasons. Sometimes they simply don't have the option of signing on at the time, but are also known and active here. I really need to rethink my various assumptions...

I'm not sure that AM do get less votes than they deserve. I personally tend not to downvote AM posts as quickly as I would named posts (unless they're particularly obnoxious), but I will upvote stuff regardless of the author.

As far as points go, I stopped running out of votes regularly just before the recent XP change, have started again now and hope to stop again after rising a level or two. One thing I've noticed about this discussion that people who are a bit higher-ranked are not complaining about running out of votes, whereas people with lower ranks seem to do (well duh! ;-). If the goal of PM were to make every participant happy it may be better to change the XP system once again, so that there's a high rate of vote-increase in the first levels until one gets to 20, and then slow down (say one additional vote per level). That being said, I don't think it's a big deal and I'm happy with the system as it is :-).