Yes.

Other factors include time of day, weekend or not -- the longer a thread is "recent" the more views and therefore votes it will get -- and probably several more I can't even think of.

It's definitely not a scientific tool, but the law of averages makes it somewhat useful as a progress bar, I think. For example, the depth-of-post factor should apply to all Monks roughly equally, if we assume that all Monks behave the same in terms of how deep into a thread they would be likely to post.

if we assume that all Monks behave the same in terms of how deep into a thread they would be likely to post

Agreed, but I tend to tire easily, whereas BrowserUk tends to be tenacious. My guess is his XP/Posts would crush mine if deep posts were excluded:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+
| Pos | St. | Monk name    |  XP  |     Level      |  Age  | XP/Age | 
+Posts | XP/Posts |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------
+-----------------+
|    1     2 BrowserUk     159,881        Pope (28)   4,971  36.0644  
+22,404    6.9144 |
|    8    20 toolic         43,023      Bishop (22)   3,130  14.7489  
+ 3,597   11.0906 |
[download]

Well, that would be an interesting question. Clearly the deeper posts tend to acquire fewer votes, but is it all because of depth, or it is (also) because the perceived quality of the posts is greater the "shallower" they are?

Follow-up posts tend in general to be progressively less pithy, more OT, and in some cases, less courteous.

But remember that you only need one upvote to gain the first XP on a post, so prolific output of varied quality may have an advantage over less frequent, higher quality posts. Certainly it seems to me that the overall "winners" are those who strike that balance the most.



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.