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FYI: In the rep recalculation for questions, privileges didn't follow.

Today, a single upvote on this question, which constitutes all my activity on that site since recalculation, triggered the message from crossing the 3K threshold, though the threshold is not actually crossed in the transition from 3,125 to 3,135.

Screenshot

This old question suggests that privileges can be lost in reputation recalculation; it seems like the reverse should also apply and this looks like a bug.

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  • It would be interesting to know if the privileges did apply and only the notification was late to the party. Have you noticed a close link under questions before transitioning from 3,125 to 3,135?
    – Frédéric Hamidi
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 16:54
  • @FrédéricHamidi Nope, but I wasn't looking. My participation has been pretty limited lately. I tried checking on Law.SE where the recalc likely granted me the Protect Questions privilege, but can't easily find a protectable question (age >1 day with at least 1 answer from a user with <10 rep).
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 16:56
  • @FrédéricHamidi Also, I have the privilege on so many other sites that even if I was looking and had seen it, I wouldn't have noticed or considered it remarkable.
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 17:04

2 Answers 2

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You gained the privilege the moment you passed the reputation threshold due to the recalculation. You weren't notified of the privilege until now because recalculations do not trigger privilege notifications - it's incredibly rare that a recalculation would ever put a user in a situation where that would occur.

Only a new event that increases your reputation (in this case, the upvote) can trigger a privilege notification.

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  • "Recalculations do not trigger privilege notifications." They do trigger badge notifications, and you say they trigger privilege changes. That they do not trigger privilege notifications seems like a bug, from a UI/UX perspective. Also, Marc Gravell reports "I've seen rep recalc result in increases as many times as decreases" so this may not be as "incredibly rare" as implied here. Even if it is rare, there's something to be said for handling that case well.
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:09
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    @WBT Most increases from recalculations are restoring reputation from previously lost reputation. Those increases would put them back at levels they had previously attained, not send them clear past thresholds for new privileges. Privileges are calculated on the fly based on your current reputation - there is no bit that gets set/unset to tell whether you have it. E.g. if you currently have 3,000+ reputation, the close stuff is shown to you.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:19
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    Past that, recalculations are already a very expensive process to run because it's going through your entire history of reputation. Running more stuff on top of that process to handle edge cases like this just makes it harder and more intensive to run that process versus just waiting for a new event to occur for them.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:20
  • Then why do the processing for badges on a recalculation? That's even more expensive. It seems like the same UX-based explanation would apply toward a conclusion of including privilege notifications in the recomputation too.
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:37
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    I'm not sure what you're referencing. There are no badges that are based on reputation? All badges run on their own cycles of varying lengths. There is nothing reputation-based that directly triggers badges.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:39
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    In the recomputation, I got plenty of notices about newly received "Yearling" badges which are based on reputation, as are Mortarboard, Epic, and Legendary. Those badge notifications are more expensive to compute than privilege notifications.
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:42
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    Those were not triggered by the recalculation, though. As I said, badges run on schedules. The Yearling badge is checked something like once a day by running a query for all users currently eligible to receive a badge. We do not run a check to see if you are now eligible for a Yearling badge at a recalculation or a new reputation event.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:50
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    You're offering a programmer's defense to a UI/UX bug report. The user can't quite tell and doesn't care if the badge notification is in the same script as reputation recalculation or not. The visible outcome is that they happen at pretty much the same time, but that the corresponding privilege notifications don't happen until a potentially much later time around an event that did not involve crossing a threshold. Can you see from a UI/UX/user's perspective, how that seems like unexpected system behavior that doesn't match reasonable user expectations about things meaning what they imply?
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:55
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    I understand the UX issue there. I'm saying this is how the system is designed to work for very good reasons. You can accept that or not. But it's highly unlikely to ever change.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:56
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    I still think this should be considered a valid and open bug report. Maybe [status-declined] would fit better than [status-bydesign] if you just don't want to listen to users and still want to mark it closed. [Status-bydesign] indicates you don't see a UX issue here.
    – WBT
    Commented Nov 25, 2019 at 19:58
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Just to add to animuson's answer: a new event that decreases one's reputation (e.g., a downvote) may also trigger a privilege notification. (It happened to me on Medical Sciences SE, if I recall correctly.)

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