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Apologies in advance if this is a duplicate, but I couldn't find it.

The reputation summary on SO tells me I received 180 reputation today (if I click the envelope icon, then "summary", then "today"). As I understand it this is 20 less than the cap of 200. An answer that I posted earlier (within the last two hours), before I reached 180, has 1 upvote and 0 downvotes and earned 7 reputation. My most recent answer has 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes and has earned 5 reputation. No CW stuff is involved, as far as I can tell.

Can anyone explain to me what's happening here?

Edit, in response to Marc, but also as an afterthought: no, I haven't done a lot of downvoting nor been downvoted. Specifically, I haven't reached the cap and then gone down to 180 or anything like that, nor do I have enough downvoting to make the difference. Nor did I reach the cap at all, to my knowledge.

Edit 2: Marc's point about unaccepted answers seems valid, except for that it happened that two questions got weird (<10) amounts of reputation. Still possible?

Edit 3: it happened again today. I was at 182 reputation for the day, including -3 in downvotes, and I just received 7 points for an upvote, capping me at 189. So frustrating. I'm almost certain I didn't reach 200 at any point today.

Edit 3.5: Right after I typed that, I had two answers accepted, putting me at 219. I thought about the case where one of those got in while I was still at 182, but that would put me up to 197 and then I would have received 3 for the last upvote, not 7.

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  • You should associate your account on meta with the one on SO. Right now, if I click on your account name here, I can't see any SO associated account. It will also give you 100 rep points here.
    – alex
    Jan 5, 2010 at 22:24
  • Much better! You should have also received a little extra on SO, I believe.
    – alex
    Jan 5, 2010 at 22:39
  • Thought of another possibility Jan 5, 2010 at 23:32
  • 100 rep points? I didn't get no stinkin' rep points! Now I feel left out...
    – user141115
    Jan 6, 2010 at 1:26
  • @Clueless: I believe you need 200 rep points on one of the sites. You've got that as I can see. Disassociating the re-associating accounts and should do the trick. Jan 6, 2010 at 9:06

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Interesting... this pattern is repeated on Jon's rep tracker. Have you perhaps done lots of downvoting today? The other possibility is that you've had some answers unaccepted - i.e. you hit the cap briefly, and then have had points subtracted due to losing a green tick on an old answer.

Oh, there is another possibility - it sometimes happens that a well-meaning overly grateful user upvotes your account heavily, triggering suspicious voting patterns. This then cancels the suspicious votes; it is possible that 2 of these votes were part of your days rep.

i.e. say you had +180, and then somebody upvoted you like a crazy mad thing; you'd max at +200, the rest would be discarded, and then (at some point) their 30 (or whatever) votes are cancelled taking you back to +180. Don't ask me the exact details of the suspicious voting algorithm, as I genuinely don't know.

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  • Sorry, I reread - I guess its not all that unthinkable that two answers were unaccepted after hitting the cap. But, suppose that did happen - would it be possible for me to hit the cap twice (getting amounts of 7 and 5)? It seems that if this was going to happen, then after the cap was hit once, nothing could give me reputation.
    – danben
    Jan 5, 2010 at 22:04
  • Would the algorithm kick in this fast?
    – alex
    Jan 6, 2010 at 0:08
  • I honestly don't know. Unfortunate timing vs a scheduled task, perhaps? Jan 6, 2010 at 7:38
  • Is it the case then that once you hit the cap, you can't get any more rep via upvotes that day no matter how much you lose via un-upvotes, un-accepts, etc?
    – danben
    Jan 6, 2010 at 15:59

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