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I saw from this post that a recalculation of reps happened recently. I also saw from this post that Robert Harvey can apparently determine what posts caused the rep change during the recalculation.

Rob's comment from the post:

The question was deleted on one of the answers you posted (how do I zip/unzip on the unix commandline?), so your answer went bye-bye as well. That's where the 10 points went.

Is there anywhere that users can see this information or is that limited to moderators?

If there is currently no way, what are the chances of getting a feature that does this?

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  • Since 10k users can also see deleted, with the right URL they can also point out to where you lost some mojo
    – random
    Feb 27, 2011 at 19:37
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    @random so do we just ask the first 10k user we see?
    – Antony
    Feb 27, 2011 at 22:38
  • @Antony No, because it's hard for even 10k users to find deleted questions (this is by design). Only diamond moderators have the tools to do this properly.
    – Pollyanna
    Mar 2, 2011 at 17:07
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    @polly - thanks. i'm just a bit peeved that I lost 10% rep and i'm only active in low-traffic areas.
    – Antony
    Mar 2, 2011 at 22:13

3 Answers 3

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There are two primary sources of reputation change from a reputation recalc: user deletions and post deletions. Their reversals also will cause changes. Due to how they are handled, there are difficulties in narrowing down the source of reputation change for any given recalc incident. I wouldn't hold out for the availability of getting this kind of breakdown, at least not in any time soon.

User Deletions

When a user is deleted, all of their votes are deleted. So anyone whose posts that they voted, up or down, will lose the reputation change from their votes.

Knowing whose deletions affect your reputation is, well, knowing who is upvoting or downvoting your posts. This is private information, ♦ moderators don't even get access to complete knowledge (we can only see volume-based trends, not specifically which posts).

In effect, the only way to track this is the same way that you try to track when people withdraw their votes or acceptances. Unless you've keenly memorized your vote tables, it's not an easy task. Thankfully, these are rarer as far as causes of reputation change are concerned.

Post Deletions

When a post is deleted, any reputation effects from it are lost. This includes the -1 cost to downvote someone else's post, you'll get it back post-recalc. Migrated posts also fall under this, since their content gets deleted. The audit tracks neither your displayed reputation nor the date of deletions, so it doesn't have a reference point to give this information itself. This is, once again, similar to when a vote or acceptance is withdrawn, it is treated as if the event never happened, not that it was reverted.

Diago explains that ♦ moderators can see all of the deleted posts of a user. There are also a few requests on Meta for allowing the user to see their own stuff on their own profile, but this has not been implemented. This helps a lot towards finding it, though it can be a lot to sift through if you have a lot of contributions.

Knowing deleted content is only half the battle, though. All that tells you is the total impact you are missing out on. To know the specifics for a particular recalc requires knowing when the last recalc was and consequently not just what posts were deleted since then but also any posts that may have been undeleted. The reputation audit doesn't track that kind of stuff. And since it is not limitted to only your own posts, well, it gets a little messy to try and track all of that.

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It think this would go hand-in-hand with fixing the fundamental problem in the reputation system - when a question is deleted or migrated then all the contributors have their reputation recalculated with a recent activity message added that indicates that specific question they participated in was deleted/moved and their reputation was recalculated.

Alternately build the reputation adjustment into the system as a live feature, so no recalc needs to be done - just alert the user that the question was deleted or moved and add that as a message in their recent activity.

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When looking at a users profile, moderators can see the questions and answers that were deleted in the question list. When someone has a small profile, it's fairly use to track down what caused the drop in reputation, in others, we have to go through pages of answers and questions to find them.

As far as I am aware this is a moderator only feature used to evaluate a particular profile when dealing with spam and other oddities on an account, and is not available to anyone else.

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