Understanding Processing Order

The important point relative to scoring, is that scoring occurs before rules evaluation. This means that rules can act on scores on incoming articles because the scores are evaluated and assigned before rules are processed.
When Gravity retrieves headers, processing takes place as follows:

1.   The headers are downloaded from your news server.

2.   Gravity checks to see if scoring needs to be applied to this newsgroup, and if so, applies the values.  It does this by examining all of the groups (possibly wildcard expressions) in the list of groups to be scored, and if the newsgroup matches, then the scores are evaluated.  Any scores that have expired are also removed during this phase.

3.   Gravity then runs any rules that are enabled for the newsgroup.  Note that rules can operate on the score by examining, adding to, or subtracting from it.

4.   When you display the articles, they are threaded according to the setting you have chosen under Global Options - Display.  If you have chosen to thread by scoring, then Gravity will sort the threads by the score value.

5.   If you have created Score Color ranges, the background colors for the various ranges are set.