Hello, and welcome to this strange utopia we call Everything2.

As you may or may not have noticed, the level requirements have changed dramatically over the past week. The requirements are as followed:

          OldWU NewWU OldXP NewXP
Level  1      -     -     -     -
Level  2     25    20    50    50
Level  3     70    50   200   250
Level  4    150   120   400   500
Level  5    250   200   800  1000
Level  6    380   300  1350  4000
Level  7    515   450  2100  7000
Level  8    700   600  2900 10000
Level  9    900   750  4000 15000
Level 10   1215  1000  7500 25000

There are three reasons for these changes:

  • The times they are a-changin'. With the bar raised, the time required to submit writeups of quality has increased exponentially since 1999. Lowering the limits reflects this change, and allows contributing users to experience gains at a more practical rate.
  • Vote early and vote often. As you'll note, the XP requirements have actually seen more dramatic upgrades than even the writeup requirements. This is twofold in its reasoning. First, it will encourage more people to vote, thus giving every writeup more opportunities to be read and given feedback (which is one of the most-requested features of e2.) Secondly, this will prevent blatant Noding For Numbers. The old XP requirements allowed an average reputation of between 4 and 5 on every writeup - assuming a person didn't vote at all. The new XP requirements means if you node for numbers you'll have to work three times as hard as the quality noder next to you in line.
  • You can check out any time you like ... We want more new users to contribute and become members of e2 faster. There is a possibility the writeup requirement will be reduced to 15 in the future. Ultimately, we are interested in quality users, and a large quantity of them. The balancing scale between quality and quantity will become irrelevant in the new e2, but for the time being we are trying to ease up on the quality metric just a bit, in hopes that we will attract a quantity of good users.

As for people who may have gained and then lost levels due to the lowering writeups/rising XP requirements, please contact me and I will be glad to assist you in any way I can. Thanks, everyone, for all of the writing you do. I have read so many wonderful things at this site that I've simply lost count. And now:

This place needs more actual content. Let's begin.

- k