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Recently a user asked a question on Meta asking about his deleted account (I won't draw attention to him or his question unless it is really necessary but shouldn't be hard to find - at least until the question gets deleted1 as I don't know if it is relevant to this question).

However, while looking at his account, it appears as if he received the association bonus on all of his accounts, including the new Stack Overflow account he just created, but does not have any account with >200 rep.

The most likely scenario is that the deleted account had more than 200 rep and triggered the association bonus, but that leads to 2 questions:

  1. Why did his previously associated accounts retain the association bonus?
  2. Why did he get an association bonus on his brand new account?

Is this a or ?

1 - The post in question was deleted by the OP several hours ago but before then the account was confirmed by a mod to be deleted due violations of a sock puppety nature (which I think everyone suspected at the time). Given that the account in question was a sock puppet, I think it highlights an important reason for removing the association bonus when the account that triggered the bonus is deleted. Theoretically, as long as he keeps getting the association bonus, he can go to any site and already have more than enough privileges to do damage.

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    Aww, you're so nice trying to keep the poor guy from getting even more downvotes.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Aug 1, 2013 at 12:51
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    @CodyGray if this is a bug, then this is going to cost him about 100 rep on every single site, so I don't think I am being that nice. :)
    – psubsee2003
    Aug 1, 2013 at 12:53
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    And it'll be his last 100 on most, too! You bastard ;)
    – Mołot
    Aug 1, 2013 at 12:56

2 Answers 2

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This is probably just a side-effect of the current implementation.

Once the association bonus is obtained, it is never lost, even if your reputation drops below 200. It doesn't matter that the user in question no longer has any accounts above 200. All that matters to the system is at one point in time, said user had an account at 200+ reputation, so now all existing and newly created accounts get 100 bonus points.

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The user may have 200 reputation on one of the other sites because of the 100 he got from the association bonus and then he didn't lose that because of something like a bug. If that isn't the case it could be a bug.

I don't know who the user is so I wouldn't know what's the case.

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    The user in question had no accounts with more than 200 rep, so there's nothing that triggered the association bonus except a deleted account.
    – psubsee2003
    Dec 24, 2013 at 11:59

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