Trying to add something useful to this discussion, but most of my ideas keep centering around how 'karma' seems to encourage grandstanding or individuals vs community building. So my feeling is cart before the horse or at least as texrat and others have mentioned we're deciding out of sequence possibly here.

To be more specific on this particular topic I would question whether it is really appropriate that Testing, which should encompass several manual checks and not an insignificant time commitment (until the 'monkey tests' are automated) should equate less than someone who writes a comment or even a post that can say something as unhelpful as WTF this <insert feature> suxors? I'm not aware of how to 'bury' a post as mentioned in the original list, but I would say there are lots and lots of posts (that would be earning karma apparently) that are not helpful and do nothing to further the community or any agenda other than the poster's ranting.

As other have mentioned in most systems where you 'reward' something based purely on numbers, then you'll definately get more of those numbers, however you'd better make sure that more quantity vs quality is what you really want.

And as a final aside that veers off topic, but needs to be dealt with for this to matter, is it took me a very long time to find where my own karma points were. And I'm still not sure I'm understanding the whole picture since I had to use I think 3 separate accounts to log in across different sections of what I would expect to all the be same website, Maemo.org. Not to mention how any of that would correlate if I posted on any of the mailing lists