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I hope this isn't a duplicate. Similar questions that I found are over a year old.

I have seen cases where shortly after an upvote (perhaps on an old answer?), the summary in my user activity dropdown shows inconsistent counts:

enter image description here

Particularly, the Slid a div offscreen using jQuery answer shows +40, when it was only updated once yesterday. Now, if this is a monthly total for this question, then it is correct, but when I refreshed later I got:

enter image description here

Now it shows +10, and other entries completely disappear.

So, what is this supposed to show me? At the very least I am confused about what I am supposed to see here.

Here is another example:

enter image description here

This shows +20 for the same question as before, after I received a single upvote last night. What gives?

You can see from my reputation that there was only a sinle upvote recently:

enter image description here

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  • The older questions had more to do with the reputation totals at the top. None that I could see addressed the activity feed at the bottom. But I didn't know what to call it in order to do a better search.
    – Jeff B
    Apr 23, 2012 at 17:41
  • Are those screen captures really only 5 minutes apart (but also have 200 reviews more pending...?), or is it a 24 hours and 5 minutes?
    – Arjan
    Apr 23, 2012 at 17:46
  • 5 minutes apart. But now you have me wondering if I had a cached page open in a tab... But this gets more confusing because the +10 for the slide question was upvoted 18 hours ago, and the first time I accessed from this computer since then was today. So, these had to be 5 minutes apart.
    – Jeff B
    Apr 23, 2012 at 17:55
  • Also, I took both screen caps today, and the time seems to always be current.
    – Jeff B
    Apr 23, 2012 at 18:00
  • Ah, the clock is updated when keeping the dialog open. Don't know if votes are updated too then. Can't upvote twice; if you want to test then some edit is needed so I can remove and recast the vote... It might be easier to await an answer from the crew though!
    – Arjan
    Apr 23, 2012 at 18:00
  • @Arjan. I saw the same thing here.
    – user173320
    Jun 24, 2012 at 22:04
  • Too bad, @gdoron, my bounty did not help: no answer as for the why. Today, all my counters have been reset again, presumably for the start of a new month. But sometimes things get reset at some random time? Not that I will lose any sleep over it, of course :-)
    – Arjan
    Jul 1, 2012 at 21:07
  • @Arjan. :( Well... can't you just leave a comment to one of the devs to answer this question?
    – user173320
    Jul 1, 2012 at 21:23

1 Answer 1

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Hover the number with your mouse and you'll see the timeframe it applies to.

(And: hovering is often your friend when you need help on Stack Exchange.)

For some time I thought I understood how it might be supposed to work, but the following merely just confirms what you're seeing. Leaving it here for some more details.

I figured the counts were normally reset at the beginning of the month. Like on July 1st, there was just one entry in the list while that entry also has an earlier upvote on June 24th:

On June 24th, I saw one reference to "40 reputation was gained in the last 23 days":

But also "10 reputation was gained in the last 1 day 23 hours" for a post that is actually much older, but had no earlier upvotes in June:

One might think it would look in some votes table and calculate the shown values on the fly. But on April 23, 2012 when this question was asked, all counts were about a day old here on Meta. That seems seemed to suggest it's not peeking into the full votes table. And that something was odd on April 23rd.

But apparently the list is reset quite often?

Looking again Sunday around 20.45 UTC, almost 6 hours after posting the above screen captures, the list was shortened to three items, the first entry moved down in the list, and rather than "40 reputation was gained in the last 23 days" now stated "5 reputation was gained in the last 6 hours 57 minutes". This was not a new vote (and the previous screen shots were less than 6 hours old); it's just that 7 other upvotes are no longer shown in the list...

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  • Fair enough. But why does the time frame vary from access to access?
    – Jeff B
    Apr 23, 2012 at 17:39
  • That I don't know, Jeff. I think the longest I've seen is 14 days; now all are 1 day and some hours here on Meta. Maybe some server got reset...? (Oh, actually I see 20 days on Super User.)
    – Arjan
    Apr 23, 2012 at 17:40
  • Good, at least I'm asking a question without a clear answer. :)
    – Jeff B
    Apr 23, 2012 at 17:42

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