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I seem to have lost about 100 rep overnight on SO and I'm not entirely sure why. [https://stackoverflow.com/users/134754/rob-levine]

I had hit my rep cap limit, but when I look again this morning, I've lost rep (somewhere around 100) and my tally for yesterday is now below the rep limit at 175.

If I look at the breakdown of rep from yesterday, I see that for one question (3228735) I am only showing 50 rep, even though I had 9 upvotes.

I'm not overly bothered about the rep. but am interested to know why this has happened.

One thing that may have a bearing on this, is that a work colleague of mine came across my SO account yesterday and upvoted several questions, as I did to him when I got his SO account [this wasn't a blind "upvote everything"; I read his answers and only upvoted the ones I knew to be correct].

Could this be the cause?

Is this considered bad form or abuse of the rep system?

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2 Answers 2

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Multiple upvotes from the colleague is the culprit here. The same thing once happened to me.

Multiple votes (don't know the exact count) from a user on posts by the same user would be identified by the system as suspicious activity and revoked - this when combined with rep-cap, you'll end up with less points than you started with. If you hadn't hit the rep-cap, you'd have lost only his votes; but with the rep cap, the votes you received from other people after hitting the cap will be lost. They didn't yield any rep earlier and they were not accounted for after revoking suspicious votes. I guess this difference, which wouldn't be too much any way, will be rectified if a recalculation of your rep is triggered in future.

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  • yes - your previous post describes my incident exactly. Thanks!
    – Rob Levine
    Jul 13, 2010 at 8:40
  • Didn't know that... I don't know if I like it, but then I again, SO knows pretty well why they have to run such an abuse script..
    – Andreas Dolk
    Jul 13, 2010 at 9:03
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If I get it correctly, than you both were using your own SO accounts and looking at each others 'profile' for recent questions !?

To me this is a good use. Sometimes a user attracts my attention and I look at his/recent questions or answer. And I do leave upvote even on old posts if I think they're useful. Sure you can abuse the system, but there's a daily cap for upvotes and you can't put more than one vote on one question or answer, so at least you have to leave a lot of questions and answers on SO in order to abuse it effectivly ;)

Maybe a question, where you provided a good answer, has been deleted. This could explain the loss. And it's the 'game mechanics' - if you exceed your cap, additional upvotes are just for honour. If later on some upvotes, that counted, are taken back or question has been deleted, the lost reputation score is not filled up with upvotes that haven't counted for that day...

(at least that's my impression, correct me if I'm wrong)

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  • Personally, I agree - I didn't think it was abuse, especially as I only upvoted those answers I agreed with. Then again, I totally understand why they try and hunt down suspcious activity. Oh well!
    – Rob Levine
    Jul 13, 2010 at 8:39
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    In that case, could you look at some of my older posts please? ;)
    – Daniel Dyson
    Jul 13, 2010 at 16:31
  • Indeed, this is a case of everyone being punished because we live in a world where numJerks > 0.
    – Pops
    Jul 13, 2010 at 21:34
  • @Daniel - just learned that it wouldn't make sense. I can push you up to the daily rep cap but there'll be nothing left the other day.
    – Andreas Dolk
    Jul 14, 2010 at 5:59

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