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When we downvote a 1-rep user, his/her rep doesn't change since we don't do negative reps.

Question: Is the -2 completely written off, or would it be taken into account during recalc if the user has gained some reps since the downvote?

I'd suspect the answer would be former but I'm curious to know for sure.

Looking at the rep for this user who had his first question downvoted and then upvoted, we see the expected result where the -2 is written off and his rep goes up to 6.

6 != 3

This is sensible since reps are accumulated on a vote-by-vote basis and it doesn't make sense to have to dig into the rep history to handle each vote.

Even in the screenshot we see a discrepancy between the total rep and the daily rep shown. Will this remain after a recalc?

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Even more: if I downvote, and remove that downvote, the users ends up with +3: Removing a downvote adds reputation that wasn't there. However, I indeed wonder what a recalc would do. –  Arjan Nov 18 '11 at 14:05
Nice thought in a comment by Rowland: a reputation recalc processes all things in order. –  Arjan Nov 18 '11 at 14:09
@Arjan if the rep recalc does indeed process all thins in order, then that answers my question and the relevant -2's will indeed be written off. –  Shawn Chin Nov 18 '11 at 14:14
I'm considering making a sock and asking a test question... –  John Nov 18 '11 at 14:18
...but not if the vote is not somehow marked as such. Like: 1) Answer A upvoted, score 11. 2) Answer B downvoted 7 times, score 1 (not -3). 3) Answer C downvoted, score still 1. 4) Answer B deleted. 5) Recalc: 1 + 10 - 2 = 9? –  Arjan Nov 18 '11 at 14:20
@John it did cross my mind to troll on one of the SE sites just to test it out, but decided it would be faster and more *cough* responsible to simply ask on meta. –  Shawn Chin Nov 18 '11 at 14:20
I just noticed a difference between an account with downvotes that shows 1 rep as This user has no recent positive reputation changes, where another account without such downvotes shows 1 rep as This user has no reputation changes. Of course we already knew that the system knows about all downvotes. Still interesting. –  Arjan Nov 25 '11 at 10:41
As an aside, slightly related: up till February 2012, voting down a 1 rep user and then removing that downvote, might yield a reputation of 3. That is no longer the case. –  Arjan Apr 3 '12 at 20:07

2 Answers 2

up vote 10 down vote accepted

The down-votes on users with a reputation equal to 1 doesn't have effect when the user gain reputation. If a user with reputation equal to 1 writes a question that is down-voted twice, and then writes an answer that is up-voted once, his reputation will become 11, not 7. Not even a reputation recalc would change the reputation from 11 to 7, whenever the recalc is automatically triggered by the system, or manually triggered by the user.

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...but what if a recalc is done? –  Arjan Nov 18 '11 at 14:07
A recalc would not change the reputation from 11 to 9, in my example. –  kiamlaluno Nov 18 '11 at 14:16
Shouldn't it be "manually trigger by the user"? I noticed you're avid "English Language and Usage" user so I'm not really sure. –  Shadow Wizard Feb 13 '13 at 9:33
@ShaWizDowArd My reputation on EL&U doesn't make me a native speaker: I can choose the wrong word too. ;) –  kiamlaluno Feb 13 '13 at 9:38
Cheers, I feel much better now. :D –  Shadow Wizard Feb 13 '13 at 9:41
@ShaWizDowArd Me too! ;) –  kiamlaluno Feb 13 '13 at 9:42

They are not taken into account. If they were, then the person effectively "had" negative points, but it wasn't shown.

A person with 1 rep can have a question with -10 votes on it. As soon as I upvote the question to -9, that person's rep becomes 6. If someone else comes along and downvotes it back to -10, then their rep becomes 4, because they just lost 2 points from that last down vote.

A manual or system-wide recalc should not change that equation.

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That much I'm aware of. From an implementation point of view, it's more efficient to update the reps on a vote-by-vote basis and not have to dig into the rep history. I'm wondering what happens on recalc. –  Shawn Chin Nov 18 '11 at 13:58
@ShawnChin Nothing should change on a recalc. If the recalc did it differently, then that would effectively put the person into negative rep territory. –  LarsTech Nov 18 '11 at 14:03
How do you know a recalc doesn't affect this? –  Arjan Nov 18 '11 at 14:05
@LarsTech a recalc could potentially sum up all votes and set to 1 if it is negative. This will give a different value compared to the run-time resetting on negative values. –  Shawn Chin Nov 18 '11 at 14:12
@Arjan I changed my answer to "should not" vs "does not" since I don't have access to the source code. But I've watched my own recalc results and you can see how it computes the rep number. If a recalc didn't do the calculations based on "when" the points were upvoted or downvoted, it would be a serious flaw in the recalc method. –  LarsTech Nov 18 '11 at 14:13

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