I'm going to agree with most of the comments already made by rob_au and dws.

Most of the online groups I'm part of track postings in some way, and from that you can see how long a particular member has been part of the community.
More importantly it's possible to see the track record of a particular poster.
That's about all it allows.

I wouldn't say that XP is a clear cut way of figuring out how much a user knows.

• Does the post make any sense?
• Does the post answer the question?
• And possibly, does it raise any more interesting points?
• (add a stack of things I've skipped for simplicity)

If you've the points above, then reading the post is worth your time and your votes - regardless of the poster's XP.

There are monks out there that joined about the same time as me. They obviously know a lot more about Perl than I do, but at one point I had a couple of levels over them - not any more, now that they've been able to post, but I'd hate to think that my input would be seen as worth more than someone more capable.

The opposite is true as well - I wouldn't like to think that a post that I've submitted (provided it's right, of course :-) would be seen as less worthy than a post by one of the higher level monks.

Cheers.

Baz