5

I've read this post and others about how score for the top users page is calculated, and my understanding was that score = sum of all values of (upvotes - downvotes) for answers that are not Community Wiki.

Does the calculation of score for All-Time Top Answerers omit closed questions? Here is where I'm confused. Yesterday, I had a score of 85 in the Windows-8 category, and I received 5 upvotes for my answers to 2 questions tagged windows-8 (and no downvotes). One of my answers received 1 upvote, and the other answer received 4 upvotes.

So today, I expected my score to be 90 when it is recalculated daily, but it was 87.

One reason that I can think of is that one of the questions (the one where my answer received 4 upvotes) was closed. But this still doesn't make sense, because if it eliminated that question from the calculation, my score should have been recalculated as 86, not 87.

The other possible explanation is that it is a timing thing (only 1 upvote was recorded before the answer was closed, so the other 3 don't count), but I looked at the timings - the question was closed 11 hours ago, and all 4 upvotes occurred 24 hours (or more) ago. Therefore, all 4 upvotes happened before the question was closed.

Is this a bug? If not, where is my logic breaking down?

Improve this question
0

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
3

I think I've figured this out, and it's an issue of timing. For those 5 upvotes, 3 of them were received between 02:27-02:57. According to this post, the top users page is calculated daily at 3am UTC. So that means that those 3 upvotes were already included in my original score of 85 when it was calculated for the previous day. Then, in the next day's calculation, it got the remaining 2 upvotes, which caused the 85 --> 87.

My mistake was looking at "today's reputation change" and assuming that correlated exactly to when the top users page is calculated. But since it is calculated at 3am UTC and "today's" boundary is midnight UTC, there is a window in there that threw me off.

Improve this answer
2

If you click on the tag in your user profile, you'll get this page. And if you go through and count up the scores, I come to 87.

Most likely, in addition to the 5 points on 2 questions, you also either lost votes to account for the fact that your score was 3 points lower than you expected.

  1. Someone might have downvoted 3 of your posts, or removed an upvote
  2. A question you answered might have been deleted
  3. An answer of yours was deleted.
Improve this answer
1
  • +1 upvote - I think it was actually an issue of timing and not losing votes, but thanks for the suggestions and manual count!
    – Jennifer Marsman - MSFT
    Commented Dec 26, 2012 at 4:17

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .