## Why It Matters

Most triage queues contain a handful of researchers who submit often and land rarely. You learn who they are eventually, but only after you have read the fifth report. The **Low signal** marker puts that knowledge on the row: reports from researchers whose submissions to *your* program are usually rejected are labelled before you open them.

It is a hint to a human deciding what to read first. Nothing else changes.

## How It's Measured

A researcher is low signal in your program when both are true:

| Condition | Threshold |
|-----------|-----------|
| Reports submitted **to this program** | At least 5 |
| Share of them accepted | Below 75% |

Under five reports nobody is ever marked — absence of evidence is not evidence, and a first-timer is not a spammer.

A report counts as accepted unless it was **dismissed** or closed as **informative** — except that a severity-priced [bounty](/docs/bounties-and-payouts) always counts it, whatever the status. A discretionary bonus does not.

The ratio only ever counts reports in **your** program. A researcher's record in another company's program never reaches your queue, and yours never reaches theirs.

It also counts only the reports **you** can open. Restricted reports you hold no grant on stay out of the arithmetic, so the marker can never hint at the existence or the outcome of a report you are not cleared to read. Two colleagues looking at the same row may therefore see different ratios — or one a marker and the other none.

## Why Not Karma

[Karma](/docs/metrics-and-exports) sums report volume, bounties, and severity bonuses, and never divides by the rejected ones. It measures prolificacy, not precision — in real data the highest-karma researcher in the system was accepted 60% of the time while several researchers still on default karma sat at 91–100%.

So the two answer different questions. Karma tells you how much a researcher has contributed; the acceptance ratio tells you how often they are right. For the same reason, the [Slack report card](/docs/slack-report-threads) now prints the acceptance ratio on its trust line instead of a karma tier.

## Where It Appears

- Report lists in [VDP > Reports](/csirt/reports), beside the researcher on each row
- The Slack report card's trust line

## What It Does Not Do

It does not change the SLA, does not reorder the queue, does not dismiss anything, and places no restriction on the researcher — for the throttles that actually block submissions, see [Submission Limits and Spam Blocks](/docs/submission-limits-and-spam-blocks).

> [!IMPORTANT]
> The marker is **staff-only**. It never appears in the [researcher portal](/docs/the-researcher-portal), in any researcher-facing email, or anywhere else the researcher can see. Nobody is told they have been labelled low signal.

## What's Next

- [Triaging Reports](/docs/triaging-reports) — work the queue the marker helps you order
- [Metrics and Exports](/docs/metrics-and-exports) — karma tiers, and what they do measure
- [Slack Report Threads](/docs/slack-report-threads) — the card that carries the same signal into Slack