Wow. Thanks for such a thorough response! Funny, I had 'last-log' in the deftem profile, and was tweaking ensure-news-user. I couldn't get it working, but's nice to know I was tweaking in the right places. BTW, your interpretation of what I meant by 'new day' was spot on.
I am going to spend some time trying this out. Thank you. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks again. Based on the login issue shader pointed out, I decided to change things up a bit, and ++ karma if it is a new day, and the user comments or replies. This is what I did, and it seems to work. I started with process-comment:
Arc has a feature called "ssyntax", short for symbol syntax, that allows us to use certain characters in a symbol as shorthand for a commonly used longer form.
In this case, "karma.u" expands to (karma u), which is a macro that looks up the users karma. Functions applied to single arguments are extremely common in arc, so it is quite useful to have an abbreviation.
Other ssyntax include:
a!b -> (a 'b)
~a -> (no a)
a~b -> (compose a (no b))
a:b -> (compose a b) ;(a:b c) is equivalent to (a (b c))