Curia Forum Score Integration: Measuring Delegate Engagement Beyond Voting

DAO Programs & Initiatives
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We’re excited to announce that CuriaLab is integrating Forum Score into the Arbitrum Governance Analytics Dashboard. Forum Score is a feature designed to quantify and showcase a delegate’s engagement within the Arbitrum governance discussions. By measuring contributions beyond traditional on-chain voting, it offers a holistic view of a delegate’s contribution on governance.

Shout out to the @mmurthy and Karma team for their awesome work in evaluating delegate forum engagement with their Forum Score. Their innovative and thoughtful approach has been a major inspiration for us. Building on that, we developed our own version as an alternative source of truth. Our aim is to foster richer dialogue and enhance transparency in measuring engagement data.

What is Forum Score

Forum Score is designed to provide a quantifiable measure of a delegate’s activity and engagement in DAO governance discussions. It captures off-chain contributions, such as forum discussions and comments, ensuring that constructive participation is recognized. By aggregating diverse metrics, it offers a more comprehensive evaluation of delegate engagement and contributions.

Why Did We Build It?

Governance is more than just voting; it is shaped by discussions, proposals, and deliberations. However, off-chain interactions often go unnoticed. Forum Score surfaces this data, offering DAOs a more complete assessment of delegate participation beyond voting records. By recognizing diverse forms of engagement, it enhances transparency and provides a clearer picture of each delegate’s contribution on governance.

How is Forum Score Calculated?

Forum Score aggregates several key metrics from governance activities. The calculation involves three main components, with all data points first converted into percentile scores for fair comparison across users.

Note: We only include data from users who have visited the forum for at least 10 days to ensure a stable, representative sample of active participants.

A. Proposal Score

This score measures the contributions of a user in creating and discussing proposals for the DAO in the forum.

Metrics Included:

  • Proposal Initiations: The amount of proposals a user has created.
  • Proposal Discussions: The amount of posts a user has created under a proposal thread.
  • Proposal Likes Received: The average amount of likes a user received from their proposals and posts within a proposal thread.

Relevant Proposal Categories:

  • #7 Proposal: Active AIPs
  • #9 Proposal: Finalized AIPs

Formula Component:

Proposal Score = (Prop_Initiated * 0.5) + (Prop_Discussed * 0.3) + (Prop_Like_Rec * 0.1)

B. Engagement Score

This score measures the contributions of a user to the overall forum.

Metrics Included:

  • User Topic Count: The amount of topics a user has created.
  • User Post Count: The amount of posts a user has created.
  • User Likes Received: The amount of likes a user received from all their posts and topics.

Formula Component:

Engagement Score = (User_Topic_Int * 0.7) + (User_Post_Count * 0.4) + (User_Like_Rec * 0.2)

C. Activeness Score

This score measures how active a user is in keeping up with the forum.

Metrics Included:

  • User Days Visited: The number of days a user has visited the forum.
  • User Time Read: The amount of time a user has spent reading a topic or post.

Formula Component:

Activeness Score = (User Day Visited * 0.07) + (User Time Read * 0.06)

D. Normalization and Final Calculation

Normalization Factors

All data points are first converted into percentile scores, ensuring fair comparisons across users. These percentile values are then weighted according to their importance.

  • Max Score
  • Sum of Weights × Max Score

Overall Formula:

Forum Score = ((Max_Score * 1) + (Proposal Score * 1) + (Engagement Score * 0.5) + (Activeness Score * 0.5)) / (Sum of Weights * Max_Score)

How to Link Your Forum Score

Delegates can integrate their Forum Score with their governance profiles to provide a more complete view of their participation. The process is as follows:

  1. Connect Your Wallet: Visit arbitrum.curiahub.xyz and connect your delegate wallet.
  2. Link Your Forum Account: Enter your forum username.
  3. Verify Your Identity: Sign a verification message to confirm your forum handle.
  4. Post the Generated Signature on this thread:
    • Copy: Copy the generated signature text.
    • Post: Navigate to the forum and paste the signature text.
    • Verify: Complete the verification process.

We need your Feedback!

We want to ensure Forum Score accurately reflects meaningful participation in governance. Your insights will help refine the methodology and improve its effectiveness.

We’re eager to hear your input on how we calculate Forum Score:

  • Metrics & Weights: Do the current metrics and their assigned weights (Proposal, Engagement, and Activeness Scores) reflect meaningful contributions?
  • Forum Categories: Should we revise or expand the selected proposal-related categories?
  • User Experience: How can we enhance the process of linking forum accounts to governance profiles?

Your feedback is essential to fine-tuning Forum Score and making governance participation more transparent and rewarding. Let us know your thoughts and contribute to building a more transparent and stronger governance ecosystem!

2 Likes
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how does this meaningfully differ from the Karma Forum Score?

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Hey @paulofonseca, thanks for your question. Here’s how our Forum Score differs from Karma’s:

User Subset:
Karma’s score is based on users who have linked their addresses, whereas our calculation includes all users who have visited the forum for at least 10 days. We chose this approach because we want to provide a broader, more representative snapshot of active participation while mitigating the impact of bot accounts.

Scoring Methodology:
We use a distinct set of metrics and weights that evaluate additional dimensions of forum contributions—from overall engagement to activeness. We believe this offers an alternative perspective and source of truth on each delegate forum participation.

Forum Score is just the beginning. We’re building it as a foundation for our upcoming full forum analytics, which will incorporate both quantitative and qualitative measures. At the same time, we’re eager to gather community feedback and iterate on our approach to continuously enhance the insights we provide.

Our goal is to expand the toolkit for robust governance analytics by adding another layer of transparency and understanding of delegate engagement.

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Just tried to connect my forum handle with my wallet, and it was already connected. That is great, but not sure how I did that. I might have connected sometime in the past but don’t remember.

  1. Where can I see my score? I see it is not visible yet here:

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  1. What does this number mean (top right corner) when I connect my wallet?

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Thanks.

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It looks like your forum handle was already connected because you may have posted your verification signature on Karma’s thread previously. That connection carries over.

The issue with your score not displaying properly was due to a UI bug—which we’ve just fixed. Thanks for pointing it out!

That number is simply an indicator showing your wallet address index; in your case, it means this is your 3rd and final wallet address linked.

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so… is the new Curia Forum Score, a score where Curia (the Arbitrum DAO delegate) will always score higher and be number #1 in the ranking? =)

I’m only half joking but I hope you understand how being a delegate and creating a system to score delegates is not credibly neutral at all.

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The following reflects the views of the Lampros DAO governance team, composed of Chain_L (@Blueweb), @Euphoria, and Hirangi Pandya (@Nyx), based on our combined research, analysis, and ideation.

Hey @Curia, Thanks for enhancing the Arbitrum Governance Analytics Dashboard appreciate your efforts!

I had a quick suggestion and wanted to check if this has been considered. In some cases, a delegate’s forum contributions are handled by multiple team members rather than a single account. For example, in our case, the Lampros DAO delegate is managed by @Euphoria, Chain_L (@Blueweb) and Hirangi (@Nyx), but the Forum Score on the dashboard only reflects Chain_L’s (@Blueweb) account. This was also an issue with Karma’s dashboard as well.

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How do you think the Forum Score can effectively account for delegates (there are multiple delegates with similar structure) who have multiple contributors under a single delegation? Is there a way to aggregate contributions from multiple accounts linked to the same delegate?

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We understand the sensitivity around scoring delegates, which is why we’ve been fully transparent by publishing a complete breakdown of our methodology and welcoming community feedback.

It’s worth noting that the dynamics you mentioned aren’t unique to us. For example, the SeedGov team—who are also delegates—run the Delegate Incentive Program, evaluate delegate performance, and publish their methodology, inviting community input to ensure neutrality. Our approach with the Curia Forum Score follows a similar path. We’ve designed our metrics and weights to capture measurable forum engagement objectively, without favoring any delegate.

Our goal is to provide a data-driven tool that accurately reflects forum participation, and we’re committed to refining it with ongoing community feedback.

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That’s not a fair comparison. If SeedGov were paying themselves as if they were a delegate participating in the DIP, then it would be a fair comparison. But there’s a reason why SeedGov is not scoring themselves on the DIP criteria, right?

But my main issue is regarding the fragmentation of delegate information across several platforms (Snapshot, Tally, Karma, and now Curia) without that information being onchain (and no, not behind an API) and publicly accessible to everyone else, so that it is truly composable.

That’s why I commented in this other post with

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Also, potential bug here: why do I have 53 not voted proposals (and 64 voted), and therefore a 54.7% participation rate?

I believe you are counting proposals that you shouldn’t. You should only count votes on proposals when delegates had more than 0 ARB delegated to them.

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Our intention with the Curia Forum Score isn’t to create a standalone scoring system—it’s meant to be a starting point that anyone can eventually build upon and align with.

Perhaps our comparison wasn’t the best example, and we recognize that comparing our approach to SeedGov’s DIP program isn’t an exact match. Our focus has been on full transparency by publishing a complete breakdown of our methodology and actively welcoming community feedback. This openness is essential to refining and evolving the system so that it fairly captures delegate engagement based on measurable forum activities.

We hear you on this point and are actively exploring ways to address it—ensuring that delegate information becomes fully composable and, ideally, on-chain. We really appreciate your feedback on this.

Thanks for flagging this! We identified that the discrepancy in proposal counts and participation rate was due to a UI bug, which we’ve just fixed. Also note that we calculating the participation rate starting from when you voted on your first proposal.

Thanks again for your thoughtful input!

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Yeah but you see… I’m a weird one. =)

My first vote was here, 271 days ago, with 0 ARB without ever having ARB delegated to my wallet. Yes this is weird, but is possible to do, you just need to pay the gas fees for voting on an onchain vote, and you can even write a vote reason onchain. =)

And the first time my wallet had ARB delegated to it, was here, 174 days ago, and since then I’ve always voted on all Arbitrum DAO proposals.

So, you should count voting history, not since the first vote, but since the first time the wallet had ARB delegated to it.

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Thanks for providing this alternative calculation method @Curia. It’s hard for many, us included, to make a full judgement on this alternative forum contribution calculation or to provide feedback without some concrete examples.

It would be great to see a comparison between this and the Karma method for a few delegates as case studies, perhaps also along with a sensitivity analysis or something similar. I’m sure the various factors taken into account influence both yours and Karma’s scores in different ways and there will be different tradeoffs and compromises for the two scoring methods - I would love to get a better understanding of these. Does Curia have anything like this that was produced as part of the development or is planned for the future?

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How does this increase proposal and engagement quality?