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Karma is a unit of measurement that describes your participation on Heavy Electrons.

You get Karma points for when you: start a compelling conversation (as measured by how many people join the conversation), write a good post (as measured by positive ratings from other people), rate other people’s posts positively, send or receive compliments, fill out your profile completely, log in regularly, and other stuff we haven’t fully worked out yet : )

You lose Karma points for having your posts rated poorly by other people (troll, factual error, etc.), not logging in for over two weeks, and other stuff we haven’t fully worked out yet.

Notice the parts about stuff we haven’t fully worked out yet? Yeah, we are still figuring out the whole Karma thing. Its not fully active yet and we will be changing the scale as we watch how it works in testing and tweak it here and there. During alpha testing we encourage you to try and game the Karma system so we can figure out how to avoid that.

The scoreboard summarizes the opinions expressed in a conversation.

Many conversations are started with a post that asks a question such as “Which of the Bronte sisters is the best writer and why?”. When people join the conversation they will most likely give their opinion. When you see this conversation you may want to read every single post - but if you don’t you can just look at the scoreboard in the upper right and see a breakdown such as:

35% Charlotte
30% Emily
20% Anne
10% Other
5% No Opinion

The Scoreboard is useful to get a idea of what the general consensus is with just a glance.

Also, it avoids the minority opinion getting buried by the majority. You can sort the conversations posts by rating & opinion so that the minority opinions come to the top along with the majority ones.

Also, it is fun. You can recruit your like-minded friends to join the conversation so that your side wins : )

No Opinion is the default setting, if you do not summarize your opinion it will be grouped with No Opinion.

Other is the catch-all category. Opinions that are not in the top four will be lumped together in the Other category.

Be careful that if “Charlotte” is one of the options for a summary of your post you don’t write your own along the lines of “Charlotte is the best” because it will divide the pro-Charlotte votes. Your single “Charlotte is the best” will be lumped into Other and will not be counted with the majority “Charlotte” votes (the code is smart but not that smart).

You might want to take a look at FAQ #2.

The summarize box is where you distill your brilliant piece of prose into 15 characters.

If you don’t want to summarize or forget to summarize your post will be categorized as No Opinion.