"Revision added" in karma is unclear.

[Joey Stanford]

Hi,

When you look at karma, the term "Revision added" is not in any particular context. Did you revise the subject? or the Title? or something else?

I'd suggest we rename it when we're in the code to something like "BZR Revision added"

Joey

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

It's "Bazaar" or "bzr" not "BZR".

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

[Paul Hummer (rockstar)]

I agree that clarification is better, but "Revision added" should imply that you added a revision. It should have nothing to do with branch properties (Is karma given for changing those?).

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

To be frank the Karma table is pretty much useless until it links back to the particular object it relates to, and once that is done it will be clear what "Revision" means.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:44:27 Martin Pool wrote:
> To be frank the Karma table is pretty much useless until it links back
> to the particular object it relates to, and once that is done it will be
> clear what "Revision" means.

That will never happen. By design, the karma events don't map back to what
caused the karma to come into existence.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

> That will never happen. By design, the karma events don't map back to what
> caused the karma to come into existence.

Wow, that's very interesting.

So the larger context is bug 275941 (wanting karma to link to the action) and bug 261628 (wanting a timeline) and bug 275938 (questioning why it's limited to 25 actions.)

At any rate I think this bug only makes sense to fix in the context of fixing those bugs. If the karma table is useless by design it hardly matters what text is in it. :-)

Perhaps as an intermediate step the karma table could change to say "Committed revision 20 in lp:bzr", which would make it both more clear and more concrete (therefore more meaningful.) But if you're going to do that why not have a link.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Not as interesting as knowing the reason for the design decision.

[Stuart Bishop (stub)]

Karma isn't a generic audit trail. If you need an audit trail on branch events, you need to implement one rather than shoe horn one in to a system that wasn't designed for it. You already have all the information in the database to present a recent revisions screen for a person, avoiding the need for them to abuse the karma page for this.

There are currently over 15 million karma events in the database, and the growth rate is exponential because Launchpad gets busier and because the code is updated to generate more karma events. If karma is to scale, we have to summarize and rollup karma events, and remove them entirely when they are no longer relevant. Tying individual karma events to context will make it much harder to decouple and do the refactoring we know has to occur.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

One way of fixing this bug would be to remove the karma page completely, or to make it admin-only. A person activity log would be a brilliant feature, and as long as the karma page is present people will want it to fulfill that role when it can't. The only use case I know of for the karma page is learning how to game the karma system.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

2009/3/18 Matthew Paul Thomas <email address hidden>:
> One way of fixing this bug would be to remove the karma page completely,
> or to make it admin-only. A person activity log would be a brilliant
> feature, and as long as the karma page is present people will want it to
> fulfill that role when it can't. The only use case I know of for the
> karma page is learning how to game the karma system.

I think you're right. The Karma number could instead just have a (?)
link going to the help page about karma.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

I'm not going to pretend that we are going to fix this.

I expect an activity log would be more interesting.