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So today something weird happened while I was doing my daily business on Physics.SE. I'm not too worried with my rep, but I love numbers and my rep has ended with a 6 for the last week or so. I'll not bore you with details, but essentially today I noticed out of the blue that I lost 2 rep arbitrarily. I check my rep-o-meter logs and they didn't say a user was removed or that I had been downvoted or anything. I didn't do any downvoting myself. None of my posts were deleted. In fact, there was no notification anywhere (not the top bar, not the rep page, nothing) that my rep had changed at all.

Thankfully I had my site's meta page open and hadn't refreshed it for an hour. It confirmed a rep ending with a 6 at most an hour before, but the main site showed rep ending with a 4 and no action I had taken or was notified of had caused this -2.

So I have to know, what can cause you to lose (or gain; let's make this more broadly applicable) rep without being notified at all? Does this happen often? Have we all lost scores of rep in unnoticed and unnotified -2's here and there?

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A couple of answers you had previously downvoted were just undeleted a couple hours ago, which means the -1 for each of those downvotes would start affecting you again. This is somewhat an "undocumented" event because what happens is the removed post event gets dropped from your reputation history and it all goes back to as if the post had never been deleted.

You should be getting 1 reputation back again sometime soon, because one of those answers has since been deleted again.

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  • Well, that solves my problem. For posterity, what other types of rep change events go undocumented like this?
    – Jim
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 20:42
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    Off the top of my head, if a user retracts their vote within the same day, it gets rolled up and not displayed at all. So if they had upvoted you at the beginning of the day and then retracted it at the end of the day, you'd have no idea where that 10 reputation went. Pretty much anything else would be around undeletion events like this.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 20:44
  • i think that unaccepts are similarly undocumented, both for the acceptor and the acceptee @acuriousjim
    – MTL
    Commented Apr 19, 2015 at 5:02
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It's possible that a downvoted post of yours (+1/-4 answer or +2/-4 question) got deleted, thus causing you to lose 2 rep.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of notification (or lack thereof) that would trigger though.

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  • Nope. I had none of my posts deleted. And I'd never keep a post around that was so overwhelmingly downvoted.
    – Jim
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 20:31
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    Also, let's stick to answering the question. You can suggest solutions to my specific mystery in the comments, no prob (encouraged even). But my question is what kinds of rep changes give no notification at all. Answers should address this so that future users can find a handy list of all possible causes
    – Jim
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 20:39

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