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Yesterday I was very happy because my total rep was over 40000. This morning I was stunned seeing it had dropped to 39693.

Does anybody know what happened?

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  • 1
    Did you already check tex.stackexchange.com/reputation?
    – Stefan Kottwitz Mod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 11:10
  • @StefanKottwitz Yes, but I triggered a recalc some hours ago and have to wait for it to work again.
    – egreg
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 11:12
  • I now did a reputation recalc of your account using the moderator tools, with no change in the reputation. It is possible to loose some reputation because not everything which has an impact on it is done synchronously. I myself lost 30rep or so once, but over 300 sounds very weird.
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 11:18
  • @MartinScharrer Well, it's not much of a problem, but I'm quite surprised: I was over 120 days with 200 rep and now it tells me I'm at 120. It seems that 10 days (at least) have disappeared.
    – egreg
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 11:24
  • 7
    The usual suspects are deleted or migrated questions, the reputation for those is removed after the next recalc. The other possibility is the voting-anomaly script, that will remove anomalous voting patterns and trigger a reputation recalc.
    – user6222
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 11:55
  • 1
    Yes, I think the voting-anomaly script is the most likely cause. If there are several people which voted a lot for you and not much for anyone else then the script would remove these votes after a while.
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 13:13
  • Here we go, today 5th Nov at 3am UTC: ScheduledController.InvalidateVotes() old rep = 40203, new rep = 39573. Looks like the voting-anomaly script to me.
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 13:16
  • @MartinScharrer 700?
    – egreg
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 13:51
  • Well 630; maybe someone which gave you 63 up-votes got accidentally marked as sock-puppet by the script after coming over some threshold. The SX admins might help you further, but we moderators don't get more information as well.
    – Martin Scharrer Mod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 14:02
  • @Fabian Is it possible to know what was the cause?
    – egreg
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 14:15
  • 2
    Not easily, the moderators don't have access to that data. I'm assuming you didn't use sockpuppets to upvote your own answers, the most likely explanation is that someone liked one of your answers and went through your profile upvoting more of them. This can trigger the automatic script.
    – user6222
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 14:50
  • 2
    I hope such a script is not triggered too easily. Some days ago I also upvoted several answers of egreg when I looked through his answers, but not unusual many I think.
    – Stefan Kottwitz Mod
    Commented Nov 5, 2011 at 17:16
  • 1
    @egreg No one (except me?) paid attention to that fact that you were very happy to reach the 40,000 mark. Congratulations! Ps. I have a long way to go to reach that mark :)
    – Sony
    Commented Nov 6, 2011 at 12:46
  • Seems to be fixed, you're back at 40k ;-)
    – doncherry
    Commented Nov 6, 2011 at 19:20
  • 1
    @doncherry Yeah; as Paulo said, it's like celebrating birthday twice in a week. :)
    – egreg
    Commented Nov 6, 2011 at 19:51

1 Answer 1

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There's a script that looks for "suspicious" voting patterns between users. The details are kept intentionally vague, and normally you shouldn't ever be aware of it...

But it is possible - and in this case very probable - that 63 up-votes cast on your answers by another user were nullified early this morning.

Sadly, as one of the top users on the site, you're more likely to encounter extreme edge-cases like this. Normally even if you did notice an abrupt drop in reputation from something of this nature it would be for a much smaller amount... But in this case, my suspicion is that a regular user got a bit too enthusiastic about several of your answers and spooked the scripts big-time.

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