Shan points are karma in a way, except you only get one point at a time and can't get negative feedback (i.e. your shan points are monotonically increasing over time). This project is an google groups / email tracker of the exchange of Shan points.
Whenever a google group forwards a message to a specific GMail account, the
sender is added to the database with 0 initial Shan points. Every email may
contain patterns of the form name +1 or name ++, with no limit on
the number of names. Note that a name must be at least 3 characters and that
prefix forms work as well (+1 name and ++ name).
Names are resolved to specific users, and if successful, their Shan points are
incremented. See decodeUser in scraper.py for resolution rules. Note
that a user may receive at most one Shan point per email. Trying to give a user
more than one point or give yourself a point will fail miserably.
All the code is built on top of the Django framework. Why? Because Django has a
fantastic ORM and I like Python. To get things rolling, enable the tracker
app in settings.py and run the standard manage.py syncdb.
Now create a GMail account and subscribe it to the Google Group you'd like to
track. Put the account details in SCRAPER_USER and SCRAPER_PASSWORD in
settings.py. Figure out the google group id for your group (which is
specified in the X-Google-Group-Id header in every email from the group) in
SCRAPER_GOOGLE_GROUP as well.
Finally, run scraper.py. This will sign into the GMail account, block until
there's a new email, and will update the database with Shan point values if
necessary.
Lots of stuff. grep for FIXME in the codebase.