Comment 4 for bug 275938

Tim said in bug 333421 that "by design, the karma events don't map back to what caused the karma to come into existence.". If this is true, and since people commonly expect that it will link back, I'd like to at least see a Launchpad FAQ explaining why it's better that they don't.

I think I've heard that one reason is that database constraints would mean that an object could not be deleted if there are still karma events referring to it, which would mean in practice that objects could never be deleted. If this is the reason why we're not doing it let's just say so and dispel the uncertainty. On the other hand that does not seem technically insurmountable.

In this and other bugs people have said that the karma activity is "not meant to be an audit log". OK, but what precisely do you mean by "audit log" that distinguishes it from the karma view? The name connotes that it's security related or highly trusted; that doesn't seem strictly necessary for the karma log to be more useful.

If Launchpad is going to get some kind of Timeline view (per bug 261628) then presumably karma would just be presented as an annotation to the timeline view.

I think the main use case here is this: we present karma as an indication of how active a person has been in a project. A user viewing that number may want to click through to see what the person's really been doing: ok, they've filed a lot of bugs but are they sensible bugs? Are they a core developer or just a persistent gadfly? The user gets the impression that Launchpad must have this data but is refusing to disclose it, which is annoying.