In WebGUI Karma can be used to track and promote the activity of your users. Users can earn (or lose) Karma points with several activities. Karma gives a global overview of which users are logging in, and how much they contribute to your site.

Karma also allows you to give priviliges to certain users depending on their karma level.

How to Enable Karma on your site

To enable karma on your site go into the Admin Console to the Settings and select the User tab. There you see a radio button that allows you to Enable Karma.

After you have enabled that you can specify how much karma points a user will get (or lose) when logging in.

Once karma has been enabled, you'll notice that some menus in WebGUI change to reflect karma. Most notable changes take place in the collaboration system.

Karma in the collaboration system 

If karma is enabled on your site and you add a collaboration system to your site there are several options you can use to influence the way karma is awarded to people posting to that system.

Karma per post

For each post in a collaboration system the user can receive a specified amount of karma. This amount can be set separately in every collaboration system.

Karma spent to rate

In a collaboration system you can rate other people's posts. This is done by clicking on the thumbs up or thums down button. You can specify how much points will be substracted from a users karma for rating a post. (Rating costs points.)

Karma given to poster on rating

When a post is rated the one who originally posted it gets karma points, you can specify how much karma will be rewarded when a post is rated.

Adding or subtracting Karma from Users

In give Karma to a specific user go to the Admin Console and go to Users and select the User you want to give Karma. On the edit user page you will find the "Edit this user's karma." link.

Here you can specify an amount of Karma and give a description or reason for changing the amount. This description will appear in the Karma Logs.

Trading and Gifting Karma between Users

This is currently possible on the webgui.org site.

Karma Decay using the Weekly Maintenance Tasks

As seen above you can aquire karma by logging in and posting to Discussion Boards and other collaboration systems. But karma can also go away automatically. This is done with Karma decay in the weekly maintenance tasks. By default karma decays is not turned on, but when turned on it will decay with one (1) point per week to a minimum of 0 points.

To enable this setting go into the Admin Console to the Workflow and select the edit button in front of Weekly Maintenance Tasks. Select the link to Decay Karma and enter a decay factor (or leave the default of 1). Once you hit the save button this workflow has been added to the weekly maintenance tasks and it will start decaying the karma of your users automatically.

Karma Log

There is karmaLog table in WebGUI.

Practical

Turning on karma is not of very much use if you have no users on your site. By default WebGUI doesn't allow users to register themselves, so you have to register users or turn on anonymous registration.

There are currently two Karma macros which can help you display karma on your site.