Launchpad itself

Why not give points for list activity?

Asked by John Botscharow

I am new to Ubuntu and am slowly getting involved in the community, but am not ready, for a lot of reasons, to get into the projects yet But one thing that I did notice is that the best way for a new person like me to get their feet wet is to join and become more or less active on one or more mailing list, yet we do not get any karma credit for that I think that there should be karma credit set up for joining and posting to mailing lists.

There needs to be some way for people who are not "geels" to earn karma from the get go. After all, Ubuntu is not just for "geeks," right? We need to make non-technical people feel like they belong to the community too, and giving credit for mailing list activity is one way that would really work. The lists are, it appears to me, where we should go if we need technival help, so to both encourage people to use the lists as well as reward people for wanting to be a part of the community, let's reward them for list participation.

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Barry Warsaw
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Best Barry Warsaw (barry) said : 		#1

We've thought about this, and have plans to do this eventually, but it's not on the immediate horizon. I agree though that it would be good to give some karma for useful mailing lists posts. One idea that I had was to track archive messages, so those that are viewed often are given more karma. Or there could be a link in the archive message like "This helped me!" which when clicked would give a bit of karma. Another idea was to track responses to messages so that the parent messages were given a bit of karma.

Just some ideas we're mulling about.

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John Botscharow (jbotscharow) said : 		#2

Thanks, Barry. As someone who is not much of a "geek" but rather just wants a computer that works, and a former Windows user, and a bit of a marketing expert, it would help get non-technically oriented people like me more involved in the community if there were karma points awared for non-technical activities that newbies could do easily. Something to keep in mind for the future. We will never fix Bug #1 until the Ubuntu community takes a more balanced approach to technical and non-technical contributions. Not a gripe, but rather a recommendation for future changes.