Update: Please see the update at the bottom. I think I was mistaken in assessing my observation.

It's probably been this way for awhile, but I've been wondering why when a person gains XP the notification message in the XP Nodelet sometimes may report the new XP gain several times in a row before the message stops showing up.

Here is the relevant code, I think:

 1: my( $shownumbers )= @_;
   2: # send FALSE if you want people to see gain/loss w/o exact numbe
+rs
   3: 
   4: return ""
   5:     if  getId($USER) eq $HTMLVARS{default_user};
   6: 
   7: my $curexp= $USER->{experience};
   8: my $oldexp= $VARS->{oldexp};
   9: $oldexp= $curexp
  10:     if  ! defined $oldexp;
  11: my $difexp= $curexp - $oldexp;
  12: $VARS->{oldexp}= $curexp;
  13: return ""
  14:     if  0 == $difexp;
  ....... lots more below dealing with quips.
[download]

It seems that the desired behavior is to have a new XP gain reported exactly one time, not several. I can't prove that it's not just a matter of being upvoted several times, but my feeling that the upvote clusers don't fit my posting habits. For example, maybe I've gone several days between new posts. When I come back to PerlMonks, I find 6xp added. Then upon hitting, "Newest Nodes" or "Talk", I get the same six-point report. It's unlikely in that event that I really gained 6 over the course of a couple days, and then six in the matter of a few seconds again..

I don't want to put out a theory as to why it's happening in the absence of solid evidence, but it seems that $VARS->{oldexp}= $curexp; is taking several reloads to propagate to all the servers.

I guess I would be looking for confirmation that (1) There is a problem, ie, the behavior is as I describe: That the first two reloads (even via 'talk button') sometimes fail to clear the New XP message by setting $VARS{oldxp}=$curxp, and (2) That it's supposed to work as I expect: The report is supposed to show only once. A third question would be what possibilities exist as to why it's happening.

Update: Now that I finally gather the courage to suggest there might be a problem I find it impossible to duplicate the behavior I thought was happening. So perhaps $VARS->{oldexp}= $curexp; is doing exactly what it ought to, and I've been incorrect in my casual observation of the anecdotal evidence I thought was supporting my hunch. ;)