[maemo-community] Reforming Karma

[From: Jonas Hurrelmann]

On Saturday 04 October 2008 19:36:20 Simon Pickering wrote:

> * number of follow-up posts to an initial email (i.e. interest) -
> perhaps with additional scoring for starting a thread with more
> follow-ups. May cause issues for Darius-like threads, but these are
> likely to be minor.

But how should this be weighted? Is it more valuable to say something 
controversy or something all people agree on?
It's hard and nearly impossible to tell without considering any real 
semantics.

> * number of posts from a given author to a given email thread (i.e.
> involvement in said thread).

This usually means, there is some issue which two (or more) people don't agree 
on. Again, what is more valuable? An answer to a complicated (technical) 
question or a flame war if IMAP or POP3 is better? (Just to point out the 
extremes.)

> For IRC it was mentioned that both the number of lines written by a
> user as well as the number of lines addressed to a user might be a
> useful metric to rate both a user's direct involvement (the number of
> lines they write and that are written to them shortly after they have
> spoken) and their overall contribution to the community (how much
> people talk about them, when they have not typed anything for a while,
> for instance).

Again, I really can't see how this would increase the reliability. I mean we 
maybe could find an algorithm that applies some heuristics but in the end 
something like a log or root scale is much easier to implement and is still 
evenhanded enough as (simple) heuristics are usually equally error prone.
Also an direct algorithm makes it more transparent and easier to understand.

> Presumably we should ignore any lines which include the words "ping"
> or "pong" ;)

Yes, I agree that it could make sense to filter out some obvious "spam" like 
this and also single lined smileys. Maybe just a set of strings that will be 
filtered and then a check for a minimum line length could do the job. I wonder 
when a mail can be considered as "spam" in the same scenario ;-).

Best wishes
Jonas