Fair enough, but this is outside the scope of that. Nobody at Maemo was asking this to be split. Quims comments seemed quite clear. The people were asking it to be more fair. Evenly acknowledging community members for their effort, regardless of what the form that effort takes. Going back to mine and Qoles remarks, we got most of our Karma for thanks for applications we posted in the forums. If developers want more karma, they can post threads on the forums and support them, which would bring up their karma. Its all connected, and should not be split apart in my opinion.

To be clear, your lips are moving and I can hear what your saying. I just disagree with splitting karma, it just will end up with the whole "us vs them" When in fact, many of them are us, and many of us are them.

Someone may post some small apps then do some community work and then end up low on both metrics, where together they average a higher number, which would show their true community involvement. (or closer to accurate anyway)

penguinbait, based on that reply, I see we are still not speaking the same language. But I've tried several approaches and for now I give up. I contributed my thoughts based on experience and expertise; if they're seen as without merit so be it. Nothing new.

I just read through the mailing list discussion.

What a pain, two completely separate discussions, both saying similar things.

This is why I think t.m.o should become the primary location for "community" topics, and the mailing lists can focus on the development side of things.

By the way, if you want more karma for your posts, comment on the mailing list discussion, not this one

I thought I was merely agreeing with you?

HaHa, I agree wholeheartedly. I think ALL community discussions should be held on the forum, but I digress. That is another thread topic, fire it up Qole, I back it completely.

I realized at one point afterward, mainly thanks to RevdKathy, that it isn't so simple.

She's had the most profound contribution to this topic IMO. I was just vainly trying to back her up.

I agree with this rat from Texas. We must know first why we have Karma. Then we can decide which method is best to make Karma useful for this purpose.

I also, like the rat, think that having multiple indicators is a good thing... so that if we want to choose the top 3 Maemo developers, we can look at the developer-Karma and can name them. And if someday we're interested in the most helpful community members, we look at the thank-Karma.

But you know what? We already have that. Look at people's profiles and see what they get Karma for. Products? Developer, I see. Thanks? Oh, great, you help people. Favourites? Karma whore, aren't you?

The mixture of all this is pretty useless if you need to know how a person contributes. It is useful in its own right, though, because it can tell us that user X, although not within the top 10 in any of the categories, very active overall and does a lot of different things in this community that add up. That's good to know, too.

So from my POV, most of what we have is OK.
I agree with qole that some things that are more or less equal should be treated equally: Being part of a discussion is the same , no matter if it's on t.m.o., on the list or by writing comments for a news item.

I think that some or all parts of the Karma system should "age". If I, as I stated earlier, define Karma (the sum, the mixture) as a measure for community involvement, it's no use that people who left the community a year ago still have high Karma values. Don't be radical here, but find a way to let it slowly decline.

And finally there's things that just don't make sense at all. We had discussions recently if one should get Karma for thanking somebody else in the forum. I think (IIRC) it was the opinion of the majority then that this wouldn't be such a good thing because you can thank post after post after post without actually reading it. Still, giving a "thumbs up" on Planet Maemo earns you some Karma. Why's that? Yes, it show's that you are on the page and spend some time of your life on maemo.org... But it's actually very little time you spend there when you click "thumbs up".

OTOH, how are, say, wiki-edits counted? If I add one sentence to a paragraph, is it the same as if I write a 3 page article about secret gconf tweaks?

On applications: Why rely so much on the stars, the rating? One download, user gives 5 stars and comments enthusiastically. Another app: 70.000 downloads, mixed reviews and 3 stars. There has to be a way to make sure the author of the 70.000-downloads-app gets more Karma than the one who wrote the other app and downloaded it himself.

A final word:
A rule of thumb for the question of "how many posts on t.m.o. equal one bug report?" could be the amount of time it takes. Not as a direct 1:1 relation like "things you need 1 minute for earn you 1 point, tasks that typically take an hour earn you 60 points". Keep it flatter than that, but use it to determine what's more and what's less within the system.

The fact remains that the purpose of this thread was to discuss metrics used to weigh different aspects of Karma. If you want to start another thread asking what Karma should be used for, I encourage you to do so. If you want to create another thread asking if ALL community topic should be held on TMO and not on the mailing lists, I encourage you to do so.

While I think It would be nice to see some information about how these values compare to the old equations. Additionally it would be nice if we could gather some information to base some decisions on, show specifically why this is a problem, and why it needs to be fixed.

So in an attempt to get this thread back on topic. I will ask this. VDVsx has proposed some equations for calculating karma. I personally at this point don't think I have enough information about the current calculations, but I digress. Does anyone have a concern about the proposed changes.

I am concerned that one app can receive up to 300 Karma, and as a very avid supporter of maemo for 4 years, I have 437 karma. I feel like we can come up with some actual numbers, do some averaging and attempt to quantify reasons for the change.

This statement is also very concerning to me, as I believe that a years worth of helping/talking on the forums, can equal a years worth of development on an application.

How this is then calculated would need to be determined. It seems we could use Texrat's years of experience to actually crunch some numbers and see if we can come up with some quantifiable ways to equal things out.

It appears to me, things are leaning one way, and this is an attempt to lean them the other way instead of equal them out.

I agree with most of your post except for this little quibble. Let me cross post my thoughts on the exact same issue from the list for those who are not following there:

I don't take karma as a measure of invested effort, but as measure of a result/usefulness of those efforts. Saying otherwise is, to me, like saying qwerty12 should not get any karma for hacking as it's
just too easy for him to do that

I just want to point out one thing: you are famous for some seriously astonishing hacks that you did for the tablets, bringing things like KDE, the cups printing system, and various utilities to Maemo.

That's where a large part of your forum karma comes from, too, giving good support to users of your hacks and apps.

But you never pushed your installers into Extras or made a download page for any of your hacks over at maemo.org. I always thought that was too bad. Even a placeholder in Downloads that pointed the users back to tablethacker.com would have been great.

I think this non-participation in the "system" of maemo.org is the biggest reason why your karma isn't much higher.