ybiC hit the nail on the head, Ivory; that's EXACTLY why we left a bonus in place up to Level 5. One of our primary concerns was the newer monks; we don't want to make it so difficult to participate that newer monks don't feel welcome. The idea is that they will get the boost from voting, but at the same time advance slowly enough that by the time they lose the bonus, we hope they will be comfortable enough to participate through posting.

As for making people of all skill levels welcome... well, I'm not a great Perl coder, by any measure, but I feel welcome here. I hope that others do, too. That's one reason why we decided against weighting some categories over others; you can make great contributions to this site and its community without ever making a single post in Categorized Q&A or Seekers of Perl Wisdom. And those who choose to make their contributions in those other areas should be rewarded every bit as much as the people who answer a dozen questions a day.

I don't pretend this system we devised is perfect. We all think it's a step forward, and enough of us were involved, from enough levels of the community, that I feel confident we covered everybody. But there's room for improvement in the new system, too; why not stop by irc.slashnet.org #perlmonks and help us out? We could use it.

- email Ozymandias

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