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So I was the victim of serial downvoting the other day, and just had it automagically reversed. Rather than simply removing the previous votes, I was given a bonus lump of rep with the reason "serial downvote reversal". The downvotes and the bonus show up on different days. Since a whole day's quota worth of downvotes equates to quite a fraction of my daily rep cap, what happens in the following circumstances?

  1. I get 200+ rep on a particular day, but I am serial downvoted (later reversed) back to under 200. Does this day count as reaching cap?

  2. I get 200+ rep the next day, and I am also credited back the rep. Is the rep bonus immune to the rep cap in the same way bounties are?

  3. On the day I get my rep bonus, it is enough to take me to 200 rep. Does this count as capping?

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    39 downvotes ????
    – Lucifer
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 9:11
  • @Lucifer I've been nuking our front page a lot. Methinks someone got upset.
    – fredley
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 9:18
  • 1
    related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131795/…
    – Clive
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 11:06
  • 1
    @Clive Was this before the rep system updates? The 'these votes never happened' situation seems to be wrong, I definitely have the negative and positive rep visible separately in my rep feed.
    – fredley
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 11:08
  • I don't think it was before the rep updates, it was just over a month ago...but I can't remember to be honest. Maybe downvotes and upvotes work differently in that respect; what the accepted answer in the linked question says is exactly what happened in my case
    – Clive
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 11:10
  • @fredley, you may find this Q on the AI SE interesting: ai.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1427/… Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 1:16

1 Answer 1

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+50

None. Reversed votes are marked as "deleted" in the system and do not affect your rep cap on any day, including days where the votes originally occurred. The events in your reputation history are only there to keep track of your reputation (because it's weird if your reputation just changes dramatically with nothing to tell you why).

This functions the same way as if a user retracted their upvote - the upvote still appears on the original day, with an unupvote event on the day it was retracted. Neither the upvote nor the unupvote count towards those days' reputation caps anymore. If you were capped on the day the upvote originally took place, the system will recalculate your reputation to give that credit to a different vote to compensate for it no longer counting.

Similarly for downvotes - once they are all reversed, those previous days will be recalculated as if the -2s never occurred, and some upvotes could lose value to compensate for the reputation that was no longer lost.

The confusing part of this is that the reversed votes are still calculated into the total at the top of each day. So if you've rep capped at +200 for today, but you had a reversal of 40 downvotes today as well, the total will display +280, while the previous day will still show the original -80. Even though that +80/-80 is still calculated into that number, that is not your reputation cap for the day. That number is simply the amount your reputation changed that day, and should not be taken for anything else.

The only way to know you've hit the rep cap for a day is if further votes start counting for +0, or you look at your /reputation page and look for days that are 200+. That page does not include deleted/reversed votes, and it will change from parentheses to square brackets on the final vote of that day which causes you to reach the reputation cap (so if there are none with square brackets, you didn't hit the cap that day).

Also of note, the daily reputation badges no longer consider downvotes when calculating your progress. It only looks at reputation gained from positive events. So if you gained 200 that day and lost 200 from downvotes, that day would still count towards the badge because the script ignores the downvotes completely.

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