The message that appears in the reputation tab of a user's profile when they gain or lose reputation due votes disappearing when another user is deleted is simply:
user was removed
This message is confusing and unhelpful. Below are comments that demonstrate this confusion, from users who eventually found the FAQ post. I don't have any quotes from the users who could not find it and remained confused.
There is a year-old popular feature request suggesting different messages, and another suggesting adding links to a more detailed explanation. However, the message has not been changed.
I know that in the past the developers have been reluctant to direct users to meta in some situations, such as question bans, because it may cause users to post here appropriately. That does not seem to apply to this case. This is not typically a case of "users who get this message have HEAVILY abused the system"; most of us have probably seen the message at some point.
Why is this message vague and unlinked? What negative behaviour does this confusion mitigate?
My first interpretation was that I was the user who was removed!
I just simply wished the explanation on the reputation page was better. Seems like I shouldn't have had to come to the meta section to figure this out.
It must be better to show "User was removed". For a moment I just thought that I was removed :-(
the information should be better. I lost 10 points yesterday by "user removed" and assumed that I was the one being removed, leaving me wondering why and feeling somewhat embarrassed.
The recalc policy is fine. But the red mark and "user was removed" looks cryptic and unnecessarily negative--especially since the only user name mentioned on a profile is one's own. So the natural impulse is to bind "user" to the account you're looking at. (It was jarring to me and I could tell what it meant, but still this could be clearer.) I agree that orange is better than red and ideally all of these things would have hyperlinks to a help page (or at least a meta post) explaining what the deal is.
+1 (to HostileFork) for the idea of linking to an explanation of 'User was removed'. It just took me 10+ minutes to find this particular thread and read through, when I could have simply clicked through! I would also like a little more info on why user was removed (abuse, friend upvotes, rules, etc) , as that could help educate the community as a whole on what behaviors to report.
I could care less about the rep gain or loss, but when you have a loss it is a scary message without context. I honestly thought for a moment that my account had been inhibited in some way. No, it didn't say "Your account was removed." Still, there is that moment of "what did I do wrong?" which seems silly to cause simply by not posting a few extra words. A clearer "A user who voted on your posts was removed along with reputation changes they caused" would have gone a long way to not cause me to question my participation in the review queues as of late.
My problem is that the message "user has been removed" is not a clickable link like the other messages - so I had to search meta to discover this question to find out what it meant.
