Re: PM Leveling Guide.

Here's how you gain lots of XP. Reply to questions quickly and get upvoted.

As long as you don't write total nonsense, it doesn't matter what quality your answers are, because people will upvote moderately good answers the same as very good answers. There are no double or triple upvotes.

On the other hand, it does help a lot to reply quickly, because many people will check out most questions only once, and will visit only very few questions again, the ones they have found interesting or relevant to them. Thus, your answer gets a chance to be seen by many people only if you answer fast, before other people visit the same question. The scale is a few hours during the American workday, when most monks visit the site, or up to two days during a weekend.

Further, if a question get multiple replies, they are by default displayed in increasing order of posting time, and the readers may get bored before reading all replies. Due to this, if you expect that a question is easy and will get multiple replies quickly, it may even be worth to cheat by creating your reply first, then filling it with most of the content later, so that it appears above other replies even if you can't write very fast. This is, of course, risky, because if monks see your unfinished reply they might downvote.

You can write questions or other root notes too, with good titles so that people check them out. I've just found that more difficult than writing answers.

Make your writeups easy to understand, not deeply meaningful, because the internet is like television, most of the readers have a short attention span and won't think deeply on the meaning of your nodes. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't post writeups that are well thought out and deep, it's just that they're not the easy way to gain XP.)

When you notice a question such that some older question or reply of yours may be relevant, post a reply linking to those older threads. This way, you direct readers to read and vote on older threads that they would otherwise never see, and get upvotes from them. Notice questions that occurr frequently in Seekers of Perl Wisdom, give an answer to one instance, and then in each following instance, give a link to all older questions asking the same. If you just gave the right answer to a repeating question, you'd get only one upvote. If you link to multiple older questions where you have given the right answer, you'll probably get multiple upvotes, regardless of whether you copy your answer.

Comment on Re: PM Leveling Guide.

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Re^2: PM Leveling Guide. by LanX (Saint) on Mar 05, 2015 at 02:03 UTC
> As long as you don't write total nonsense, it doesn't matter what quality your answers are, because people will upvote moderately good answers the same as very goos answers. There are no double or triple upvotes. Exactly this lack of double or triple upvotes makes the system favoring mediocre posts. In the first 4 years here I restricted my votes to nodes I considered excellent. The system punished me b/c I didn't exhaust my quota. But today even after I started to upvote even moderately good answers I mostly finish the day with 20 votes left. I know that others (e.g. choroba) have similar problems. I would love to have the opportunity to give 5 upvotes for excellent elaborated posts even if I lost XP in exchange. Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)} PS: Je suis Charlie!	[reply]
Re^3: PM Leveling Guide. by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Mar 05, 2015 at 03:28 UTC
The system punished me b/c I didn't exhaust my quota. Hm. I seriously doubt there has been a single day when I have exhausted all votes in 7/8/9/10 years. Most days I vote 3 or 4 times at most. (I can't prove that; but a God could verify it if they chose to.) I guess I've been doing it wrong all these years. With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday' Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". I'm with torvalds on this In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice. Agile (and TDD) debunked	[reply]
Re^3: PM Leveling Guide. by cheako (Beadle) on Mar 05, 2015 at 04:16 UTC
There must have been simply a tone of good posts 4 years ago, going back to the beginning of PM. As I indicate in my guide on leveling look for places worthy of being voted. Today I'm convinced you could spend a lifetime reading PM and still not have read everything. The fortunes file edition: `I'm convinced you could spend a lifetime reading PerlMonks and still not have read "all the documentation." -- Mike Mestnik` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: PM Leveling Guide. by hdb (Monsignor) on Mar 05, 2015 at 06:22 UTC
Come on, at the time of writing your comment, there were only 1118829 nodes on PM, including yours. That is manageable. Come on, show more effort!	[reply]
Re^5: PM Leveling Guide. by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Mar 05, 2015 at 06:54 UTC
Re^6: PM Leveling Guide. by hdb (Monsignor) on Mar 05, 2015 at 07:45 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
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Re^2: PM Leveling Guide. by LanX (Saint) on Mar 04, 2015 at 11:01 UTC
Shush, quiet! Don't give away all secrets... ;-) Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)} PS: Je suis Charlie!	[reply]
Re^2: PM Leveling Guide. by chacham (Prior) on Mar 04, 2015 at 15:25 UTC
they are by default displayed in increasing order of posting time, and the readers may get bored before reading all replies. If you do come late, reply to the first post (making some comment about it so it seems like its in the right place) and add something intelligent. This puts your post higher up and more likely to be seen. OTOH, if people don't check how many votes they use versus how many they have, PM scores bottom post first so the top votes may not be counted. So, the later posts in more recent threads may have a better chance of being hit by Votebots.	[reply]
Re^3: PM Leveling Guide. by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Mar 04, 2015 at 19:47 UTC
And avoid "Re^4" or deeper replies because, with PM defaults, you have to click again to see them and many people are too lazy to do that. To illustrate, notice that this reply is "Re^3" and so may receive stray up-votes from those who "blanket vote" all replies to a node in a single go, without the bother of having to click again to see deeply nested replies. BTW, avoiding deeply nested replies appears to be a speciality of sundialsvc4.	[reply]
Re^3: PM Leveling Guide. by ambrus (Abbot) on Mar 04, 2015 at 20:28 UTC
That could work perhaps. If your reply isn't clearly related to its parent, people may assume you've replied to the wrong node by mistake (newbies keep doing that because they can't find the big "Comment on" link for the post, only the small "reply" link next to replies), and then the janitors might reparent it. The reply might still stay in its place long enough for this trick to work.	[reply]
Re^2: PM Leveling Guide. by cheako (Beadle) on Mar 04, 2015 at 11:10 UTC
Got the TL;DR version?	[reply]
Re^3: PM Leveling Guide. by ambrus (Abbot) on Mar 04, 2015 at 11:20 UTC
No. I leave it as an exercise to you to write that. You might even get XP for it, because people read shorter nodes more often.	[reply]