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There seems to be a bug in the reputation list:

enter image description here

The site has only been active a little over a week, and looking at the last year of activigy, I have 1,125 reputation earned, but at the top you can see that I have 1,126. Every person in the list is the same way (egid has 1,390 if you click on his name, etc.).

It is the same on month and quarter, but if you click on all it shows the correct values.

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  • $\begingroup$ Quit poking holes in the site's swiss cheese code! :-) $\endgroup$
    – voretaq7
    Commented Dec 27, 2013 at 3:40

3 Answers 3

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Every user has one reputation point upon creation, presumably this is earned at the dawn of time as far as the database is concerned, or possibly never "earned" (?).

As a result until the site's age passes each of the temporal windows you can select (week, month, quarter, year) there is an off-by-one error in the rep reported.
(Right now "Week" is the only one behaving "correctly" on Aviation, showing the last 7 days of earned reputation. Because our site is more than 7 days old and the 1 mystery point is outside the window it looks at).

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  • $\begingroup$ If you select "All", the one point shows up though! I got that point when my account was created, so it should show up in month, quarter, and year as well. :-) $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Commented Dec 27, 2013 at 3:50
  • $\begingroup$ @lnafziger that would point toward "dawn of time" (01/01/1970) or similar as the date you "earned" that reputation. I do agree that intuitively it should be "earned" at account creation though (which would make the numbers all work out as you expect them to). Honestly I never thought too much about it because I expect all the numeric values the site shows me to be stale to some extent (with caching layers and whatnot) - this is the first time I've ever noticed that the behavior is counterintuitive for "new" sites/users :-) $\endgroup$
    – voretaq7
    Commented Dec 27, 2013 at 3:53
  • $\begingroup$ Well, I just figured that it was a "off by 1" bug until I saw that it worked on "all". :-) $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Commented Dec 27, 2013 at 4:24
  • $\begingroup$ @voretaq7 This is also being discussed at the [updated] MSO link in my answer. $\endgroup$
    – Danny Beckett
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 0:28
  • $\begingroup$ Yes, this is it. That shows earned - everyone has one permanent reputation point that they begin with; it can't be taken away, and you can never go below it. If your reputation is 256, you've earned 255. I believe the association bonus behaves similarly in those screens. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Post Staff
    Commented Dec 30, 2013 at 15:02
  • $\begingroup$ @timpost Empirically the association bonus seems to behave the same way - my "this month" rep is 101 points lower than my total. (Looking at /reputation it seems bonuses have no associated date, it's just a single bucket -- at least if I'm reading that record correctly...) $\endgroup$
    – voretaq7
    Commented Dec 30, 2013 at 18:52
  • $\begingroup$ @voretaq7 That's exactly what I was pointing out to you in my last comment ;) How come my association bonus didn't count towards the league, but someone else's did? $\endgroup$
    – Danny Beckett
    Commented Jan 2, 2014 at 20:34
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I thought the association bonus wasn't supposed to be counted in the specific time frames; however, after looking at the code, the 100 point association bonus is supposed to be counted, but the starting 1 point is not.

For some users, including myself, the association bonus isn't counted for some reason. It must be a race condition based on when those values are first calculated for each user, but I can only guess as to the specific cause. The temporary solution is simply for reputation to be recalculated on the affected users, and there's a relatively easy way to do that. I tried this on my local development environment and it automatically corrected my rep, so I'll talk to someone about getting that fixed in production. Perhaps someone on the core team will also have an idea as to what's causing it in the first place.

The rationale for why the starting 1 point is not included is that it is not really a reputation point, it's simply a minimum value and what our reputation counter starts at (instead of zero). It has no date associated with it - it's not even in the database - and therefore isn't considered part of any date range.

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I actually posted about an off-by-101/1 bug on MSO a week ago:

How come my association bonus didn't count towards the league, but someone else's did?

Tim Stone speculates that:

maybe it's a race condition where sometimes the association bonus is recorded microseconds before your account creation date and that messes things up

Up to now though, the bug hasn't been answered.

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    $\begingroup$ That's interesting. I hadn't noticed that it was counting for some people. In my opinion, it shouldn't count for anyone because the association bonus is simply intended to get you past the basic permission levels, not to give you a leg up in the reputation race. I'll ask someone from the core team on Monday if there is no answer before then. $\endgroup$
    – Bret Copeland Staff
    Commented Dec 29, 2013 at 17:35
  • $\begingroup$ @BretCopeland: Since this is only for the reputation race, then it probably shouldn't even show up under "all" either! Then it would be much more obvious.... $\endgroup$
    – Lnafziger
    Commented Dec 30, 2013 at 1:01
  • $\begingroup$ See my new answer. I went ahead and investigated it a little more myself. It's almost certainly a race condition, though definitely not the one Tim Stone suggests. $\endgroup$
    – Bret Copeland Staff
    Commented Dec 30, 2013 at 7:19
  • $\begingroup$ @BretCopeland Thanks for looking at it, it's interesting! I've also updated the MSO question with info from your answer. $\endgroup$
    – Danny Beckett
    Commented Jan 2, 2014 at 20:41

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