How does a user manage to have 0 + 100 reputation on beta sites?

Question

In idly looking through the users list on ELL, I noticed that right after the usual long string of 101 reputation users, there were two people with exactly 100. Nothing unusual about that, downvotes happen, except...:

Choosing another beta site at random, I got this from eBooks:

None of these profile owners have asked or answered any questions on the relevant sites. They all have the association bonus. And on all of them the association bonus is the only reputation change on the site, positive or negative. (There are other non-staff users with 100 on a couple sites I checked, but they all had asked/answered questions.)

Obviously it would be difficult to manually examine all the beta (or main) sites to determine whether the pattern continues. But what causes it in the first place? How do staff rid themselves of that pesky OCD-breaking initial 1 reputation?

waitwaitwait. Don't tell me.

Answer 1

There are a couple of things happening here:

• Reputation losses from downvoting answers is not shown unless it's your own profile, a change which was made in 2011 to prevent the information from being used for revenge downvoting.

• All the people you linked to are Stack Overflow Employees who have diamond moderator privileges on all sites. This privilege includes downvoting, which as you can see from the presence of the Critic badge or by looking at their vote summaries (at the bottom of the summary page, e.g. here).

  However, this can very rarely be seen with a regular user. At one point in time, downvotes only required 100 reputation to cast (this was likely changed sometime in late 2010). I found two users on Stack Overflow who got the association bonus and downvoted back when it only required 100 rep. It's still possible for this to happen on here on MSE, since you only need 100 rep to downvote here. During private Beta, anyone can downvote so that's another way this can happen (H/T Monica Cellio). The admittedly flawed query I used to find users like this is:

select id as [User Link] from users where downvotes > 0 and 0 = (select count(*) from posts where owneruserid = users.id)

• Downvoting an answer costs 1 rep. However, if the post is deleted that 1 rep is refunded. In this case we know Robert Cartaino cast 5 down votes all on answers, four of which must have been deleted, thus refunding 4 rep.

With enough downvotes, this can cause someone to drop below 100 points. Here's an example.

This doesn't have anything to do with the site being a beta site. In fact, the reputations of the three linked users haven't changed at all and in the meantime ELL is not a beta site anymore.