I briefly brought this up in the chatter box the other day, but this seems an appropriate node to put my comments for all to see (which could, of course, be bad :).

The problem I had with Saints in our Book, and indeed the whole XP system in general I suppose, is that you can gain XP and potentially become a saint simply by voting - you don't necessarily need to write anything.

IMHO (which may be wrong, but it's mine so I'm keeping hold of it :) once you get to a certain level within Perl Monks, your XP should depend more on your write-ups than on your voting. In fact, it should depend on answers, meditations, code, craft, cool uses, etc, but not on questions. This way, to become a saint (or some lower but still knowlegdeable(?) level) you would have to know your stuff rather than simply being able to use all your votes.

I mean no disrepect to the current members of Saints in our Book and I'm not wanting to come across as anti-Perl Monks. From what I see, nearly all current members of Saints in our Book would not be effected by my suggestion - it just seems to me that if you're going to have levels of users implying levels of skill that you should go some way to relating the two.

Thus ends this rant.