Anonymous Karma in Bodhi
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Overview
Currently Bodhi has a karma system in place to allow users to provide feedback on updates before they are pushed to the stable update repo. Karma votes can be made both anonymously and via a login session. At the moment, both are worth the same amount of karma. These karma votes are used for determining if a package should be auto-promoted or auto-demoted.
Problem Space
While Bodhi prevents logged in users from registering more than a single karma vote, the same cannot be done for Anonymous entries due to their obvious anonymous nature. This potentially allows a single user to log several of the same karma votes, effectively defeating the purpose of allowing karma feedback.
Solution Overview
In order to lessen potential abuse of the karma system, this proposal seeks to limit the weight an Anonymous karma vote has. To accomplish this, Anonymous karma votes are removed from the automation system. The Anonymous votes could still be displayed, however they would not count towards the auto-promote/demote totals.
Scope
The main impact is Bodhi itself. The changes would have impacts to the testing community as well.
Discussion Points
- Do away with Anonymous comments all together? (Too drastic an action in my opinion)
- Provide a weighted value for them instead (Can still be used to game the system)
Comments ?
- WarrenTogami: +1 to "The Anonymous votes could still be displayed, however they would not count towards the auto-promote/demote totals." We might also want to display separate numbers for logged in users and anonymous? The latter number can be called "happiness" or something.
- WarrenTogami: We might want to consider a SQL table to track IP addresses, only to prevent the same IP address from flooding with anonymous comments and votes.
- KevinKofler: As far as I can tell, anonymous votes alone can't get the karma to +/-3 in the current implementation, because "anonymous" is handled as one user, so anonymous votes can only get it to +1 or -1.
- According to the Bodhi developer, this is not the case. Currently Anonymous votes stack.
- LukeMacken: Sounds good to me. There are a few more karma-related tickets open in bodhi at the moment as well:
- current karma automatism rules are inflexible - we should probably allow developers to adjust the karma thresholds for their packages/updates.
- Anonymous users should not be able to impact karma level - addressed by this proposal
- allow adjustment of karma vote - Right now you can only negate your original vote, for example if you gave a -1 the only thing you can do is +1, which brings your vote to 0. Bodhi should allow people to change their -1 to a +1 (and vise versa).
Owners
JoshBoyer