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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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What's this Karma stuff? 6 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Think of karma as a video game score. You are awarded karma when your comments are deemed valuable by moderators. If you've got a high karma (you have the maximum now), you'll be awarded moderation points to spend on other people's comments. Karma was Rob Malda's solution to slashdot's ungainly comment system. There are more FAQs available about moderation on slashdot.org.
    • Ok, but how do I spend the points? That's what I don't get.
      • You don't spend them. They're just an indication that you've posted a lot of comments that other people find worthwhile, and thus you can be assumed to be unlikely to engage in trollish behavior.

        You lose them if you post things other people mod down, but that's not normally something you'd do intentionally.
          • You don't spend them.

          Actually, they used to have a problem on /. with people building up huge karma values and then trolling the place unmercifully using their automatic +1 karma boost. This not only allowed some of their nastier trolls to get wide distribution, but made people spend mod points in pushing them back down.

          Thus, the Karma cap was born. Now, your Karma tops out at 50.

      • On use.perl, or any other generally well-behaved slash site, you don't--the points are a mostly meaningless indicator of the length of time you've hung around. They're only useful on slash sites populated by a more typical-of-/. crowd, where low karma marks people as trolls or going against the conventional wisdom, and high karma gives automatic extra points to stuff you write.
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