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Launchpad Help > Your account > Understanding karma

Overview

Karma is one way of showing how large a contribution someone has made in Launchpad.

Almost everything you do in Launchpad helps you to build karma. For example: registering bugs, translating strings and answering support requests. Your karma is a reflection of the type of work you've done and when you did it.

Karma is only attributed for work done in Launchpad and does not apply to items imported from other sources.

How Launchpad calculates your karma

Different sorts of work are often valued differently by the projects you work with. When you work in Launchpad, it makes a note of actions that might be valuable to the relevant community.

Then, once a day, Launchpad looks at all of the work you've done and gives each action a score. The score it gives depends on:

• what sort of work you did - e.g. work on blueprints may result in more karma than some other types of work
• when you did the work.

For example: if you answer a support request today, Launchpad will give you the full score. If you answered a support request six months ago, Launchpad would award you half the score. After twelve months an action no longer counts towards your karma.

Your karma is the total of the score Launchpad awards you in each category of work.

Karma decays over time

Over time, particularly if you're not as active as you used to be, you may notice that your karma drops.

Launchpad reduces the karma it gives to older actions for two reasons:

• to reflect each individual's current work
• and to give newer users the opportunity to catch up with longer-term users.

How Launchpad calculates the score for each type of work

Overall, Launchpad ensures that the total score in each application is the same. For example: if the total karma for work in the Bug Tracker were 500, but the total for the Answer Tracker were 1,000, Launchpad would tune each category's score so that they were equal.

To do this normalisation, Launchpad adds up the total amount of karma it has given to people in each category. It then works out a scaling factor for each category and multiplies everyone's karma in each category by this scaling factor. As these scaling factors are recalculated daily, it introduces some 'wobble' into karma scores, although this evens out in the longer term.

Viewing your karma

You can see your own karma in the summary section of your Launchpad profile page.

You can also view a breakdown of where you earned your karma, along with a log of recent activities that will count towards your score. (At present Launchpad only shows the last 25 karma-earning activities, and only the type of activity, not the specific action: see bug 275938).

Next step

You can use your Launchpad identity to log into thousands of other websites through OpenID.