Much has been said about XP on Perlmonks

Indeed. And, as most of the posts from senior monks say, not much importance is placed on them. XP is a game - a sideshow to what Perlmonks is really about.

However, as a metric of the impact of a post on the monks' community, there are some noticeable trends and factors that can affect the score.

• What else is on the 24 hour newest nodes radar screen.

• The time of day it was posted. As PM is 24/7 spanning global time zones, the North American time zones are probably the most significant in this respect, followed by the European.

• Whether the node has been frontpaged. Though most people with time to seriously surf Perlmonks will be tracking newest nodes, nodes on the front page do seem to receive significantly more votes - the front page seems to be another, different "radar screen".

Posts older than a few days will rarely gain additional votes - such is the nature of Perlmonks. There are other sites using the same engine, such as Everything2, which have a completely different dynamic, where it's all about long term node reputation scores. E2 also works differently, in that nodes can be frontpaged multiple times.