Ask PG: More transparency on average karma?

[Note: Yes yes yes, obsessing over karma is unhealthy, we should focus on actually making a valuable contribution, etc. Consider all that said.]

The "average" karma displayed on a user's page is computed as follows. (1) Take the user's 50 most recent comments. (2) Delete the latest 5 (because their scores may still be increasing, making their current values unrepresentative), and the highest-scoring of the others. (3) Take the average of the remaining comments' scores. This is done asynchronously; empirically it seems like it's every few days.

This seems like a sensible system -- it's not too sensitive to outliers, ignores comments whose scores may still be changing rapidly, etc. -- but because it ignores recent events and has an unknown, variable delay in it (because it's evaluated asynchronously) and isn't clearly documented anywhere, it's not great for user feedback.

I suggest (with the understanding that there might be one or two other calls on PG's time) that

1. there should be some documentation (e.g., a link saying "(what?)" after the average score, going to a short page describing the algorithm and mentioning that the number may be a few days out of date;

2. visiting a user's user-page should trigger an update of their karma if it's more than an hour out of date -- unless user-pages are visited so frequently that that would be too expensive;

3. when the average of the most recent 5 scores is >= the average of the others, they should not be excluded from the calculation.