150
I ran some numbers because I love the science.
For the proposed rules of:
You can only gain 100 rep per post
You only gain rep for votes occurring within 6 months of the post's creation
I queried the amount of reputation gained under these rules, and what percent that is of the user's reputation earned under the current system from post up and down votes.
...
70
a user who dives straight into the community and contributes left, right and centre will still be forced to wait for privileges (and general recognition via rep)
This is intentional, and by design.
Regardless of how talented one may or may not be, they cannot waltz into a brand new community and hope to absorb its norms, behaviors, and culture in a single ...
44
Not for at least a decade
Instead of making theoretical assumptions about what people *might* gain in rep, why not go on what people have actually earned?
Update: December 2017
Using Data from the past 12 months: (Jan 2017 to 22 Dec 2017):
At least 7.5 years
Huge shoutout to @Gordon Linoff who's maintained his frankly awesome pace for 3 years running ...
43
Jon can't exceed the daily gap without a large number of accepted answers (which, along with bounties, are the only things that don't count towards the gap). To get accept marks, you'll have to keep on contributing.
If Jon were to stop answering, he would still gain 200 points every day for the foreseeable future, but other users who continue to gain ...
33
This math is pretty straightforward. At the moment I write this, Jon has 606,882 rep and #2 has 463,940 - a gap of about 150,000 rep. He gets 200-400 rep a day, the rep cap plus accepts. (Other answers have said 10K a month, which is roughly 300 a day.) Assume, for the fastest possible catchup:
Jon's accepts stop dead when he stops posting answers
User #2 ...
28
I agree completely. In the case of votes on your posts, the sum of (up-votes - down-votes) should be calculated at the end of the day, not throughout the day.
If I have earned 21 up-votes on answers, and 1 down-vote, it shouldn't matter when that down-vote happened, it should be offset by the 21 up-votes. It doesn't seem fair that, currently, someone who ...
27
I'm not really for or against the rep cap. But I strongly dislike your proposed replacements. Even if they solved a real problem (which I don't think they do, for the same reason I'm not a staunch supporter of the rep cap), they are too harmful in themselves to be a good solution to anything.
For any given post, impose a cap of +100 rep from votes.
10 ...
25
Consider your rep as water in a bucket, so if you reach your daily rep cap, that means your bucket is full. Now, when someone up-votes you beyond your rep cap, which is analogous to adding more water to the already full bucket - the bucket will simply overflow. Your up-votes at the time of your daily rep being the max are simply gone.
Now, when someone ...
25
The loss of reputation affects the rep cap of the day the upvote was given, not on the day the upvote was removed.
If you had exceeded the rep cap by more than 10 rep on the day you got the upvote from the now removed user then you would not have lost any rep; the other rep from that day would have compensated for the lost rep.
The fact that you lost the ...
22
I'm with you on that one. I've already suggested this to be done with something along the lines of
19
I am kind of amazed how all the answers seem to miss the mark regarding of the actual intent of the rep cap (even Jeff's one only alludes to it):
rep cap is at the heart of what Stack Exchange promotes:
Ie, not posting stuff just for the sake of it, but putting answers to... actually answer the user's question
In other words, whatever the number of votes ...
18
To control your addiction.
If you reach the rep cap it is time to return to your real life. It works for me. And I really think it is a good thing. If we would not have it some people would just go on and on and maybe could not stop chasing that rep all the time.
18
TL;DR
If it's a rankings issue, let's fix it with a new league or two instead of changing the reputation system.
Analysis
I don't think the problem is either the daily cap or necro-rep. I am currently ranked in the top 0.20% for the month, despite being new, having (relatively) low reputation, and never once having hit the daily rate cap.
While I agree ...
17
You're right; you weren't the first person to think of this. I once contemplated it while getting rid of old 1- or 2-scoring answers, so I did some science and no, you don't get extra rep from undeleting those posts.
Even if the reputation graph displays the reputation you originally earned from votes on those answers, by undeleting them, it'll nullify the ...
answered Jun 13 '12 at 17:45
BoltClock's a Unicorn
40.6k10 gold badges136 silver badges231 bronze badges
16
Yes, and you will be caught. Don't do that.
Although creating a second account is of itself not against the rules, creating one to transfer bounty is seen in a rather dim light and will lead to a suspension for voting fraud.
The moderators have tools that help them detect this sort of mis-behaviour.
Besides, creating the bounty costs you reputation, so ...
16
Jon Skeet is about 143K reputation above the next highest users. Furthermore, he has over 27,000 posts. He hit the reputation cap today 6 hours in to the day. Most likely, he will get 200 reputation even if he doesn't answer another question for a long time to come. But that will limit his ability to get accepted answers, dropping his rate down some. This ...
16
The system already corrects this on its own. We don't run a recalc on your account every time you change a vote - that's just way too expensive. Instead, whenever your account gets recalculated again next, you'll lose the 1 reputation because it won't make sense anymore. You'll only keep the erroneous reputation as long as it takes the system to schedule a ...
15
As I understand it, the purpose of this alternate system is to provide greater incentive to high-rep users in order for them to continue to participate in SO. The question is this: does it matter?
In general, if you've broken 20K rep, you're pretty active on SO. You answer a lot of questions and you probably ask some good ones. In all likelihood, you ...
14
MrGomez was recently on a bounty crusade, during which he amassed 1225 reputation on April 2, 2012, of which 1050 came from bounties alone, and 30 from accepted answers.
He didn't even hit the daily rep cap! If he had, the total reputation he could have earned that day would be 1280.
That said, I don't think there is a feasible way or a tool to find out ...
answered Jul 27 '12 at 22:00
BoltClock's a Unicorn
40.6k10 gold badges136 silver badges231 bronze badges
14
All you have written is your assumption. If you have lost (not gained) actual reputation due to reputation cap because of the serial voting, tomorrow any reputation you have lost due to serial voting will be given to you.
From What is serial voting and how does it affect me?
Will I get back reputation lost due to the reputation cap?
Yes. Whenever ...
14
It's probably more related to what you can do with the reputation than what is necessary to reach the daily reputation limit. For instance, it takes 2.5 days (2 if you have the association bonus) to get access to the review queues (Meta Stack Exchange is an exception) which is one of the keystones of moderation on Stack Exchange. In addition, on beta sites, ...
13
Many years ago, we simplified the logic for the daily reputation badges.
They only consider positive reputation changes. That means the script that awards the badge doesn't even look at downvotes, and in that regard doesn't actually pay attention to how much net reputation you earned at all. It only adds up the total reputation you gained from upvotes, ...
13
You hit the reputation cap. As explained in How does "Reputation" work?:
A maximum of +200 reputation may be gained per day. Accepted answers are immune to this cap (source) as are bounties (source). (A new day starts 0:00 UTC == 7pm EST == 4pm PST == 1am CET == 5:30 am IST.)
You have 3 accepted answers, at +15 each, so you got 245 - 3(...
13
It's not based on hitting the cap. Rather, it's based on the votes it... apparently still assumes you have gotten for that day. Some level of cache state indeed.
In the past, there has been a day where I had a +5 answer that I had to delete. I only had gotten 130 reputation or so at that point, so a recalc left me with 80. However... fast-forward a few more ...
13
You had a downvote before - the upvote ended up rounding up to the 200 rep cap.
13
Your reputation will be recalculated at the end of the day: The serial upvotes will be removed.
The later upvotes will give 10 additional reputation, provided that you haven't reached the rep cap yet (undone serial upvotes do not count towards this cap).
13
You control when you accept an answer.
It makes little sense to make those 2 points count towards the cap, as it will result in strategic accepting.
13
You start by saying
Assuming that continuing to earn votes after hitting the daily reputation cap is considered a "Good Thing" (i.e. a behavior that the site would like to promote)
Well... that assumption is incorrect. The reason the system has a cap is to encourage users to have some balance and to spend their time in other ways, whether on the network (...
13
Upvotes are not capped, only the reputation is capped.
Upvotes on your answers still count towards your tag badges.
12
I spent some time looking at this (with @NickCraver), and there's just not a reasonable way for us to calculate this sort of negative-rep backfill in realtime efficiently, and it makes a pretty substantial mess of historical rep calculations (i.e., questions being closed causes a reputation recalc). That's not to say that the arguments made by @...
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