Points is a fun statistic in GNOME Bugzilla. It roughly measures how active you are in this GNOME Bugzilla installation, and could be thought of as a form of aggregate-over-time score from the Weekly Bug Summary. The scoring mechanism is subject to the whim of the bugmasters, so don't take too much stock in it. But it makes for a fun competition, by yourself or with others. How many points do you have? Just a little more work could get you up to the next level. :-)

The original idea behind points was that having a rough measure of how active a person was in GNOME Bugzilla might help triagers (bugsquad volunteers) who are getting started by helping them know:

but that is a somewhat error prone use of points as expert hackers or heavy users of distro bug trackers might not have done as much in GNOME GNOME Bugzilla and thus their points score might be 20 below what their 'experience' level might really reflect. A much more important criteria to show is whether the person is a developer of the relevant module or the reporter of the given bug (both of which are currently shown in addition to points). However, even as an error prone rough estimate, it's still better than no information and might still be useful for such purposes. Just realize that if you use it this way it's no silver bullet.

The current formula for points (remember, this is subject to change on the whim of the bugmasters) is:

log_10(1 + #comments) + log_2(1 + #bugs_closed) + log_2(1 + #bugs_reported)