Re: Ranking the Saints by XP Efficiency

[ww]

I find your explanation of the deduction for days-as-a-monk

"I also try to get at meaningful data by deducting a point for each day as a Monk, since I'm most interested in XP efficiency based on real contributions to the Monastery, i.e. XP for upvotes and for votes cast, not for votes accumulated through simple longevity."

a bit curious for two reasons:

1. deducting one "point for each day as a Monk" seems a less than rigorous way of accounting for this (from Voting/Experience System):
   Visiting the site regularly.
       You have 25% chance of gaining 2 XP points once a day if you were logged in within the past 24 hours
       from when the vote fairy does the rounds.
   

   Would it not be closer (albeit, still imprecise since as you note there are numerous variables for which we can't readily account) to deduct 0.5 points/day in the expectation that over time ((2 points * 25%) * days)) would be statistically more probable (at least for a moderately regular visitor)?

         and
    
2. as to XP/node, would it not more clearly reflect a merit ranking for a users posted nodes by using the data from Perl Monks User Search. Obviously that's perhaps a bit more than a SMOP ... more like QLOP ("quite'a lot of programming") because one would have to add code to
   1. ascertain the actual number of writeups by each user
   2. insert a user name and the number of writeups into ("Show") limit in PM User Search
   3. extract and process that data... for as many cases as specified on the CLI

And even that has a major flaw: PM User Search will report XP ONLY FOR THOSE NODES UPON WHICH THE USER BEING ASSESSED IS THE LOGGED-IN USER. There are probably other defects in this set of comments, which is really inspired only by admiration for the OP! (which does actually need a less problematic formatting module, as noted by choroba, above).

UPDATE: re 2. above: I should be clear: that's NOT OP's stated intent; it's merely a variant approach that I would happen to favor, were it feasible.
and, way too many fixes of bad markup, punctuation, etc. My Bad!

[1nickt]

Thanks, ww. I was lazy and didn't reread the Voting/Experience System explanation.

Script changed to only deduct 0.5 XP per day as a monk. This makes a meaningful difference in score to certain Monks who were lurkers for a long time and later became active posters -- but that doesn't guarantee an upward change in ranking since everyone else also benefits from the change.

Before:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+
| Pos | St. | Monk name    |  XP  |     Level      |  Age  | XP/Age | 
+Posts | XP/Posts |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+
|  134   nnn CertainMonk     nnnnn       Vicar (15)   4,963   0.3876  
+   791    2.1024 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+

After:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+
| Pos | St. | Monk name    |  XP  |     Level      |  Age  | XP/Age | 
+Posts | XP/Posts |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+
|  139   nnn CertainMonk     nnnnn       Vicar (15)   4,963   0.9662  
+   791    5.2396 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+