After signing in today I noticed that my reputation has gone down 100+ points, it was at 2900 just yesterday. I haven't gotten notifications about questions closed, I've checked recent comments I've made and they haven't been like way downvoted in the past 12 hours. When I go to the reputation page on my account, it says -120 for 'user was removed' and links to this post. Is this the case for if someone was suspended as well? Or people who deactivate their accounts? The post makes it seem like this situation is only for users are forced to leave or have their accounts manually deleted by moderators, but I didn't think BSE had any permanent deletions? I know some people have left BSE after all the recent drama so I didn't know if points would get taken away for votes by people who have chosen to delete their accounts or something. Or are we cool enough to have already attracted spammers..?
2 Answers
I think it is linked with JM having asked for his account to be deleted. He's now referred as "user213" (e.g. here) without any user account profile anymore. As he was quite active on the site, many of us received -X points recently which corresponds to his upvotes of our questions. Maybe some received extra points if he had only downvoted them :-)
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$\begingroup$ While it's a bit of a weird situation since so many of you know each other outside this site, and I don't know that there is a particular rule against using public information to ID deleted users, generally I think it's not good taste to do so. I think most of us realize that nothing is ever truly "deleted" from the internet, of course, but I think it's best to respect a user's privacy to not have their name on their account any more. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 19:56
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2$\begingroup$ @BryanKrause I agree, that's why i used the initials "JM" and not his full former user name. Did you think that "JM" was his full user name or do you mean that i even shouldnt use the initials to make it more anonymous? $\endgroup$– NoilCommented Aug 31, 2022 at 21:22
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$\begingroup$ Ah, I see - no, I did not think JM was the full user name, but it was enough for me to guess the specific user from my limited interaction here. I had assumed you were using it as a term of familiarity that people would typically know that person by (e.g., maybe it was their name in some other off-site channel) and didn't realize that you had used the initials to try to not fully reveal the person. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 31, 2022 at 23:00
Here's a site-wide meta post about this:
What does "user was removed" mean and why did my reputation change because of it?
'User removed' is from an account being deleted, either by choice of the user or deletion due to violations. When a user account is deleted, all their votes are typically invalidated. For voluntary account deletions, there is a manual review step for staff and staff can choose to keep a user's votes in the system even after the account is gone, but this is typically reserved for accounts that have many, many votes and it is decided that the damage to the network is greater than the risk for abuse.
One reason to do this is that users who delete their accounts can certainly come back, and that shouldn't let them vote for things twice just because they deleted the first account.
I know some people have left BSE after all the recent drama so I didn't know if points would get taken away for votes by people who have chosen to delete their accounts or something.
I'd assume this is what happened - someone who voted for 12 of your posts manually deleted their account. Given the timing, this may have been someone upset about the suspensions, but it's not really possible for anyone to know as the system keeps these things private.
