The Low Signal Marker
A staff-only hint next to reports from researchers whose submissions to your program are usually rejected — how the acceptance ratio is measured, and why it isn't karma.
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 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 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 now prints the acceptance ratio on its trust line instead of a karma tier.
Where It Appears
- Report lists in VDP > 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.
Important
The marker is staff-only. It never appears in 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 — work the queue the marker helps you order
- Metrics and Exports — karma tiers, and what they do measure
- Slack Report Threads — the card that carries the same signal into Slack