I'm with Abigail on XP being mostly silly. I've been programming Perl in some capacity or other for about six years, but I only made my first PM post a couple of weeks ago, and consequently only have a few hundred XP. Right now I'm trying to hurry my way up to Friar just so I can get the site abilities that come with it, but after that I could care less about XP.

The only reliable heuristic you can use to preemptively judge the quality of a post is the user id of the poster, not their corresponding XP. The only way that a user id will be of use to you is if you've been poking around on the site long enough to start recognizing handles and associating talent with them.

It is for this reason that I would consider it unfortunate were Abigail were to to give up the screen name and post anonymously or under a new account. I've come to recognize the screen name and associate it with quality posts, not because of the thousands of XP, but because of the actual posts I've read coming from that account. Were a new account created, I would eventually associate the new screen name with posts of high quality, but there would be a lag. Were Abigail to go the anonymous route, I would not ever be able to build up a mental handle heuristic.

So, learn names, and forget about XP.