Sites

There are three main types of privilege thresholds (sorted from high to low):

• Stack Overflow and graduated sites with a design (example)

• public betas and non-designed sites (example)

• private betas and this Harvard University site

Some sites have a unique privilege (level) schema:

• Ask Patents

• Area 51 (scroll down to "What is reputation?")

  • Area 51 Discussions uses the same schema as designed sites

Additionally, per-site metas do not have reputation, deriving their reputation straight from their corresponding main site (with some caching).

The three main types are covered in the table below. Some minor changes to individual sites are indicated with a † in the table and explained further below.

Site-specific changes:

• At the moment, only Stack Overflow, Mathematics, and Meta Stack Exchange require new users to go through a tutorial before being allowed to ask.

• Stack Overflow for Teams users can participate in Meta Stack Overflow with just 1 reputation. Additionally, some sites allow 1-rep users to participate in meta. The list of sites may change, but currently they are:

  • Ask Patents
  • MathOverflow
  • Code Golf
  • Stack Overflow in Japanese / スタック・オーバーフロー
  • Worldbuilding

• On all other sites, you can ask a question about your own post on the site's per-site meta with just 1 reputation.

• Only the following sites require 10 reputation to embed images (everyone can upload and link images, but embedding requires reputation):

  • Stack Overflow
  • Server Fault
  • Super User
  • Ask Ubuntu
  • Mathematics

• Commenting everywhere on Meta Stack Exchange is already allowed at 5 reputation. On Stack Apps, there is no threshold at all.

• Downvoting on Meta Stack Exchange is allowed at 100 reputation, not 125.

• The First Posts and Late Answers review queues don't exist on Meta Stack Exchange (and all per-site metas), so on Meta Stack Exchange, the minimum requirement to access any review queue is 2,000. (For this reason, the privilege page on this site states that 2,000 is the minimum requirement.)

• Tag creation on regular sites requires 300 reputation, except for:

  • Stack Overflow: 1500 reputation
  • Mathematics: 1000 reputation
  • Physics: 1000 reputation
  • Meta Stack Exchange: 500 reputation
  • Stack Apps: only 99 reputation

• Running for Stack Overflow moderator requires 3000 reputation and certain badges. On Mathematics, the minimum reputation is 1000.

Privileges not tied to a specific threshold

• To answer protected questions, you need to gain 10 reputation on the site – the association bonus does not count. In other words, the reputation threshold for answering protected questions if you have the bonus is 110, not 10. (Being a ♦ moderator does not suffice.)
  • This does not apply on per-site metas, where you can answer protected questions if you have at least 10 rep on the main site, even if you earned it through the association bonus. (Again, being a ♦ moderator won't allow you to answer unless you have the required rep.)
• For every 1,000 reputation after gaining the moderator-tools privilege, you gain another delete vote.
• For every 2,000 reputation, you get one bonus flag per day. (You also gain bonus flags for casting helpful flags.) (Flags are capped at 100 per day for comments and 100 per day for posts.)
• If you have a gold tag badge for a certain tag, you can bindingly close and reopen questions using that tag as duplicates, and can modify the duplicate links on such questions, within limits that prevent gaming the system.
  • Specifically, the privilege works like this: consider all the tags currently on a question. Eliminate those tags that you don't have a gold tag badge for, and eliminate those tags that you were the first one to add in (per the revision history). You can exercise the privilege if and only if there is at least one tag remaining.
• Having a network-wide flair requires at least 200 rep on a specific site; having ♦ moderator or staff rights does not confer this ability.
• Only moderators and staff members may add, remove, or change red ("moderator-only") tags (e.g. status-completed) on meta questions.
• Stack Exchange staff members have certain privileges that are granted to them with their staff bit, which they can use without necessarily being a moderator, plus some additional privileges that are not granted to any users (including moderators).

When reputation thresholds change

When a site moves from one phase to another, there is no grandfathering of privileges of any kind. You'll immediately be held to the new thresholds and lose any privileges you no longer qualify for.

Chat

There are three chat domains:

• Stack Overflow
• Meta Stack Exchange
• Stack Exchange (everything else)

Your chat privileges are based on your reputation in the respective domain. Stack Overflow Chat and Meta Stack Exchange Chat use your reputation on the respective sites. The algorithm for calculating reputation on Stack Exchange Chat is a little more complicated:

• If you have at least 20 reputation on a single site but lack the network-wide association bonus rights, your SE chat reputation will simply be the sum of all your reputation on all sites.

• If you do have the association bonus rights, your SE chat reputation will be the sum of your reputation of all accounts on which you have at least 200 reputation.

• If you don't have at least 20 reputation on a single site, your SE chat reputation will be equal to the sum of your rep on all sites, minus the number of sites on which you have accounts, plus 1.

The first and third criteria were implemented to ensure that in order for users to talk in chat, they must have at least 20 reputation on a single site, or have earned 20 aggregate rep points overall on different sites (only counting the default 1 for signing up once).

Reputation earned on sites with site-specific chat servers (Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Exchange) does count toward the total reputation earned for the general Stack Exchange chat server.

Note that it may take a few hours for your chat reputation to update on all chat servers, so you may have enough rep for a privilege but not have it because your chat profile hasn't updated yet.

^{* Show your actual avatar instead of an "anonymous" avatar in chat rooms.}