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Another day, another user confused by one of these contextless messages. Losing rep is scary and without a good explanation these users end up both confused and asking yet another duplicate question on Meta.

How about we add a little "what's this?" in the form of a superscript question mark (?) or question mark icon linking to some proper description of what these mean? (or hovertext or make the words a link, something). The serial voting one in particular seems to often be read as implicating the user, which is never fun.

Additionally the "User was removed" and "serial Xvoting" descriptions are plain text, unlike normal rep changes are links. Most rep changes give a quick link to where the change happened, but these more unusual ones don't.

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  • Hmm, this reminds me of a design bug on Arqade... But anyway, good call on the unobtrusive help icon, since this information is pretty much only useful once.
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 14:20
  • A step further from this Link here. Totally approve.
    – ꓢPArcheon
    Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 16:22
  • You mean like in this mockup for closed question formatting? (image from I propose changing the term "closed" out for... something else)
    – Pops
    Commented Apr 11, 2013 at 20:02
  • @PopularDemand I've always thought the fully written out "what's this" was a bit excessive for things you're going to see often. A link and a question mark is pretty standard
    – Zelda
    Commented Apr 11, 2013 at 20:23
  • Fair enough. But that same general idea? I'm not complaining here, just trying to make sure I understand what you're suggesting.
    – Pops
    Commented Apr 11, 2013 at 20:25
  • @PopularDemand yeah, something like that, or even just a tooltip explaining something
    – Zelda
    Commented Apr 11, 2013 at 21:01

1 Answer 1

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This was done a while back (not sure exactly when). An entry for "user was removed" links to this help page and a voting-reversal entry links to this help page.

Because these events, unlike most rep changes, come from a group of posts and not just one, it's probably not practical to link to the specific questions and answers whose votes changed. I've seen four-digit rep changes for these reasons; that'd be an awful lot of entries to enumerate under an expander-triangle. It can be frustrating to not know where the hits came, but at least now you get an explanation.

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