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I noticed something strange in the reputation of one of my accounts today:

Never saw "reverted" event before, so went to one of the suggested edits and realized what happened: the user who approved my suggested edit has been removed/deleted their account.

The edit is still there. The post is still there. The effort spent in editing is still there, untouched. I really can't see any reason to take the reputation away in such a case.

Can this please be changed so that the reputation won't be lost? Personally I don't care that much, and got lots of reputation from other sources, but many people have low reputation and each point matters to them.

P.S.

This might be a bug introduced when implementing this recent change about "Could authors overturn recent community review decisions?", so tagging as a bug too.

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  • I just added a similar "tracker" to your post, via an edit I suggested ... just in case ... May 16, 2017 at 15:50
  • 2
    The rep loss looks like status-by-bad-design - in fact it was marked such twice. But phrasing it as "reverted" is definitely a new bug.
    – user315433
    May 16, 2017 at 16:51
  • @Pierre.Vriens your edit was approved by two, so don't think what described here can happen to you. :) May 16, 2017 at 19:51
  • @ShadowWizard Are you sure? interested in some kind of bet? Or is this just some challenge? May 16, 2017 at 19:53
  • @Pierre.Vriens yes, see the answer from animuson on the question Gerry linked to, this happens only when low rep user deletes their account and were the approvers of the edit. May 16, 2017 at 20:08
  • @Gerry huh, totally forgot about that. This changes things, though not sure how to edit the question now. The actual bug is the reputation removed twice, when I think about it, but I'm afraid many of the votes here are on the feature request part (which will be declined for the reasons in the official answer on that other question), so I feel it won't be fair to just remove it. Will think what to do... May 16, 2017 at 20:09
  • These didn't use to show as reverted, but as removed (and grouped together with the rest of the removed evebts) before that new feature rolled out. The revert message seems to always take precedence over everything else, which is a little annoying. Gonna have to change the logic there.
    – animuson StaffMod
    May 17, 2017 at 5:30
  • 1
    Thanks @animuson, looking forward to this change of logic. May 17, 2017 at 7:30

1 Answer 1

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I agree with this proposal, but with one caveat. Whenever an account is deleted as sockpuppet of another user, the upvotes are invalidated. Sometimes, additional reputation is gained by the master through suggested edits on a post by the sockpuppet, which is then accepted by the sockpuppet. These 'votes' aren't invalidated, but the current logic ensures that the unfairly gained reputation is still removed. That part of the system's behaviour needs to be kept in place.

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  • As far as I could tell, this reputation used to be removed even if the account deletion request fell into the staff queue to preserve votes and staff opted to do so: I'd still lose -2 or -4 rep when a very prolific user deleted their account, with the API showing that it was due to a suggested edit. Apr 25, 2022 at 16:39
  • Your caveat requires additional changes on the part of SE and effectively impossible diligence on the part of moderators. The changes needed from SE are that we would need to be able to specify both any account as a sock relation to the account being deleted and we'd need to be able to specify multiple accounts as part of the sock relationship, as the account being deleted may have provided such approvals to multiple accounts that are related.
    – Makyen
    Apr 25, 2022 at 19:45
  • While it is possible for moderators to see which suggestions have been approved by the account, it's considerable additional work. Perhaps limit the suggested edit reputation reversals to only on posts owned by the account which is being deleted. That would cover most situations wrt. sockpuppets.
    – Makyen
    Apr 25, 2022 at 19:45
  • @Makyen I would settle for a situation where if an account is deleted for sockpuppetry, all suggested edit approvals are reversed (and if not, the approvals remain). Such accounts are not likely to approve many edits.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Apr 25, 2022 at 19:49
  • Well, there's also the issue of socks deleting their own accounts to prevent mods from being able to delete their accounts as socks. We had a long-time troll (only visible to Charcoal team members) who deleted their accounts immediately after making abusive posts to prevent mods from being able to remove their account with an option that leaves an automatic suspension. In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to remove such rep as normal in most cases, while not removing if it falls into the staff queue for preserving votes and they do so. Apr 26, 2022 at 4:58
  • Good point, didn't think about it back when posting this request. Apr 26, 2022 at 7:21

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