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Now and then, the Community user is shown as the last user who modified a post:

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Since it's a bot and not a real user, would it make sense not to show its reputation (and badges)? The concept of reputation doesn't really apply to Community, and this would further distinguish it from real users. (I do know it already has a [bot] label for that purpose.) For a rough idea to how that would look like, you could have a look at MathOverflow where showing users' reputation is now opt-in.

It's entirely possible I'm overlooking something; I welcome any arguments against this proposed change.

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    Why bother making the code more complex? What's the real benefit? Does that benefit outweigh all the time and effort that needed to special-case this everywhere that such things are rendered, along with the testing, inevitable bugs that need to be fixed, both those with Community and that it might break display of other users, all the UI alignment issues and then the cost of maintaining those special cases, forever, and remembering to include that special case in new places where such information is rendered? IMO, I don't see much benefit here, definitely not enough to justify the cost.
    – Makyen
    Jul 21, 2022 at 21:31
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    This would fix the problem where sometimes Community has 3 rep, like on UX Meta...
    – Laurel
    Jul 21, 2022 at 23:42
  • @Laurel It happened once on Meta Super User: meta.superuser.com/questions/7549/…
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Jul 23, 2022 at 3:40

4 Answers 4

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Has it ever caused confusion? If it has, it may be worth doing something to hide it. But since it has its own freakin' label, I don't think there's much room for ambiguity.

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I dislike the idea of community user being special cased and becoming the only account without badges and reputation. It might seem like a refinement but it creates a display difference to all other accounts and community user is still an account.

@Robert Columbia added the interesting idea of unlocking reputation for the community user (I wonder how much rep the bot actually has) but it might be worth mentioning community user could become the account with the most reputation on a site,

Who is the Community user?

  • Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them

if we look at community user's account activity it likely is the account with the most votes, edits, and flags. It also aggregates some rejected/approved and improved reviews as can be seen by clicking Reviewer stats on a review item.

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I would like to put in my opinion here.

  1. This improvement has little to no benefit with a certain cost of editing the code and possibly making it more complex.
  2. I think it's better to keep things consistent and every user, bot or not, should have the reputation shown.

So the community bot reputation should be displayed, especially since most aren't affected by it. Some sites have community bot's with 3 reputation (provided by @Laurel), so maybe we can fix this by resetting all the community bot rep to 1.

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Makyen made a comment that this would require special case code to be added, which can get messy and time-consuming.

I have a better solution that avoids all of this and even simplifies the code.

Remove the reputation locking of Community.

By removing the rep lock, we get rid of extra special-case code that, as Laurel mentioned, is buggy anyway. Who cares if Community has 1 rep, 5 rep, or 100k rep? Not I! Anyone curious about the bot can easily find out about it.

It's also curious that rep-locking is not enforced against community-run bots like Smoke Detector. Why is this one bot special?

Equal treatment for all bots! Unlock Community's reputation!

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    Cause there's no real bots on SE other than community. Someone had to use smokey and get 20 rep for smokey to to be able to post on chat. Specific chat or 'helper' bot accounts are just regular alternate accounts. A few people even run bots under their regular accounts.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Jul 23, 2022 at 8:18

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