launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 22 February 2012 08:16, Stuart Bishop <stuart.bishop@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> If we did kill karma, I'd lobby to keep the list of karma earning
>> actions at ~/+karma; the most useful aspect of karma, to my mind.
>>
>> If the karma score went away, but we kept the activity list, would
>> anyone miss it?
>
> I've always said if we want an activity list, we should implement an
> activity list. Karma events are a rather poor implementation of an
> activity log.

+100 more.  If Launchpad has any kind of commitment to a "fewer but
better" policy, Karma numbers are an obvious thing to kill.

>  Strangely enough, it does motivate quite a lot of people. Or at least it did...

I am not convinced it motivates the most productive people.  People
who do look at it are commonly annoyed or upset by its arbitrariness
and lack of correlation with real work.  At least one person ragequit
Launchpad because they were so poorly scored in their own project.

Robert's case of "is this person a productive contributor?" I think is
handled quite well, probably better than Karma, by
<https://google.com/search?q="william+grant"+site:launchpad.net>
because that gives you both a number and a link to their actual
activities, so you can see if they do stuff or are just a noisebot.
You can also narrow to particular packages etc.  That's what I'd do if
I was assessing someone.

-- 
Martin