Rep daily limit and losing accepted answers: is this right?

Question

Just a request for a clarification. Let's say the following happens on DAy 1:

• Get 10 upvotes (100 rep);
• Have answer accepted (15 rep);
• Get another 20 upvotes (85 rep).

Total: 200 rep.

Day 2:

• Lose accepted answer (-15 rep);
• Get 30 upvotes (200 rep).

Total: 185 rep.

Is this right? Is this how it's intended to be? If so, it seems a bit wrong because not only do accepted answers not go above the rep cap until you're at the rep cap but if the OP changes his or her mind you can lose out 15 rep that you otherwise wouldn't if you'd never had the accepted answer?

I just want to get this clear in my mind because it seems to be what's happened. Am I am curious if this is intentional or unintentional.

Answer 1

I've never seen anything like that personally (I can't recall a time where I noticed I lost an accepted answer the day after, so I may have missed it at some point) but I can't say that I am surprised.

Losing an accepted answer doesn't act the same as getting (or casting) a downvote where it could potentially drop you into a negative net rep for the day, which would then allow you to climb out of the hole. It seems to act more as a "poof I'm gone" type thing where it just pretends that it never happened.

Overall this is another instance of the reputation calculating/limiting system being funky, but it will never gain much traction because it will garner the typical "You shouldn't worry too much about missing out on X rep, so we won't really look into it" responses.

Answer 2

This is totally by design; the 15 rep you earned was from the PREVIOUS day, not today. So the fact that you've hit the cap at 200 today is completely normal.

However, now that accepts and bounties are 100% immune (not just sometimes chronologically immune) to the rep cap, this is sort of irrelevant.