Hey all, and thanks for making the Monistary the wonderful place that it is. That being said, I've got a few suggestions. Good ones, I think.
First, a little explanition. As far as I know (and documentation is sketchy, for those of us below the friar line (and probably those above it), there are three seppreate content-control systems on perlmonks.
There is voting. That's the most obvious one; everybody above Initiate can vote directly on nodes, raising the nodes Rep, and often influincing the XP of the poster. Rep of posts are rarely shown directly; AFAIK only on nodes that you can't vote on (your own, when not logged in, and on nodes that you've already voted on). This is (AFAIK) so the rep of a node doesn't effect your decison of wheather or not to vote on it.
There is moderation, a simple "this post isn't a troll" that friar+s can check. This is what the checkbox in your user preferences is for. Leave it unchecked, and you'll never see anything that hasn't been moderated as OK. Check it, and you're never see whether or not a post has been moderated.
There is approval for the frontpage. If a friar+ hits the checkbox for a post, it'll go on the frontpage until their are enough newer posts that have been checked to push it off.
Basicly, my question is, why? Why are there three independent systems to sort the good nodes from the bad, the worthy to be {seen, put on the frontpage, refered to}. I think we could use a good bit of Glassnost. Let us see the reps, let us see all the comments. Let the frontpage be a better Newest Nodes. /. needs the filtering because of a much larger, less community-driven populace. Because they're News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. We aren't a news site, and don't claim that the frontpage has the stuff that matters for the reader, only for the community of the Monistary.
Thanks, James Mastros, Just Another Perl Scribe
PS: Please excuse the typos and spelling errors. I know they're there, but I'm too lazy to spellcheck.