Epic badge received too early?

Question

There are already many questions about the epic badge and that it was assigned too late, but:

I have just received the Epic badge on http://tex.stackexchange.com after earning 200 rep today (which incl. 2x15 for two accepted answers). However the rep listing under https://tex.stackexchange.com/reputation states for me:

rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 41 days
rep cap was exceeded on 48 days

I had been keeping an eye on those numbers so the badge came as a surprise. Is this an error? I'd really like to earn the badge ;-).

Also just to clarify: Must the rep cap be hit, i.e. must a limitation have been encountered? By this I mean you got 21 up-votes at one day (20 to get the max 200 rep + 1 to hit the limitation, which is than listed as [0] in the listing). Or is it enough to get 200 (or 200+) rep points in any combination? My listing tells me that both of these values are below 50 times. I've tried hitting the recalculate button, with no change.

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Ok, I manually recounted all days where I got 200 or more rep. I actually count 50 of them, however on one I had exactly 200 which might not count for the rep cap was exceeded on number while counting for the badge. This makes 49 days. I thought the last missing one might simply be because the day isn't over, but now it is 5 min after midnight UTC and it is still just 48.

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The same -2 offset happened now to me with the Legendary badge:

rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 111 days
earned at least 200 reputation on 148 days

I don't mind it at this point, but in general there should be an exact display of the days available.

Answer 1

The /reputation audit trail shows you totals per day minus deleted posts.

The count towards the Epic and Legendary badges counts days that you reached 200 points without removing deleted posts, I believe.

So if you reached 200+ points on a given day but later a question you answered is removed and losing the rep gained from your answer puts you below 200 again, the day still counts towards the badges but the /reputation list does not include it in the count at the bottom.

In your case it looks like there were 2 such days; you still earned the badge but the audit trail won't reflect that.

Answer 2

If @Martijn Pieters' answer is correct (which seems so) then all Epic/Legendary badge calculation queries on the SE Data Explorer are useless! The data dump does not contain deleted data.

_{Many of the queries are useless in the first place since days where you get 200+ rep count towards the badge and not as many, many people are confused about and queries imply - the rep cap.}

Answer 3

I received the Epic badge recently and my /reputation page showed I reached 200 rep only 46 times.

What was interesting is: even though the badges page records all the Epic badges as received at midnight, I received mine in the middle of the day, a few minutes after I reached 200 points on that day.

That made me think that the way the badge is calculated is that you have to reach 200 points on a given day for it to be counted. It doesn't matter if some of those points are later taken away (I can think of 4 ways: downvoting answers, deletions, unacceptance of an accepted answer and placing a bounty).