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In my reputation list, there is an odd entry:

-65     18:42   removed     User was removed

What doest this mean?
Why am I down 65 rep.? I'm curious how I can find out what happened and why it costed me reputation?

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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There's a lot of discussion related to this in the chat room on 22nd June 2012 which you can follow through. It started off in the question on unusual means of public transport. Michael posted an answer and apparently user 'user766' posted the same answer. According to the timestamps, user766's answer was posted after Michael's and for this reason I downvoted the latter answer commenting that it was a duplicate.

user766 believed he posted the answer at least a day earlier. What I believe may have happened (and I mentioned this to him on chat) is that he may have typed out an answer and for some reason either forgot to submit it or for some technical fault, it didn't get posted and was saved as a draft answer instead.

Anyway, on seeing the downvote, user766 believed that the moderators 'censored' his answer from appearing in the first place (we have no such capability) and then after censoring it, I downvoted the answer.

user766 got angry at this and started vandalising his own questions and answers, replacing them with lorem ipsum text. After five edits, StackExchange's vandalism countermeasures kicked in and prevented him from making edits. He then started raising multiple moderator flags to delete his answers, additionally, he also started downvoting, commenting, and vandalising other questions.

Mark Mayo and I discussed this situation in the moderator chat room and based on advice from other moderators + StackExchange employees decided to suspend his user account for a week. user766 then came to the chat room and requested his account to be deleted. We honoured this request. According to StackExchange's Terms & Conditions, the content that he wrote remains, but attributed to an anonymous account.

As a result of this, any reputation that users on Travel.SE have from votes by him were deleted from user profiles.

Hope that explains it!

EDIT: There's an explanation on Meta StackOverflow on what happens when a moderator deletes a user.

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    It does explain what happened, but seems inconsistent with previously observed behaviour on stackoverflow.com. I was under the impression that when users where deleted, not only the written content is attributed to an anonymous user, but also their votes cast previously.
    – Jacco
    Jul 13, 2012 at 15:14
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    @Jacco I agree. I was also wondering because I lost over 400 points. But users in the chat room told me that this is the expected behavior. But in my experience it is not really true. I've experienced a different behavior on SO.
    – RoflcoptrException
    Jul 13, 2012 at 15:17
  • See my edit to the answer on additional resources on this.
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Jul 13, 2012 at 15:57
  • @Jacco and Rofl - before you inadvertently start a conspiracy ;) - it's not like anything "custom" can even happen. In our mod controls there's a "delete user" option and it does the rest. So any behaviour (votes/data/content/history) is completely controlled by the system.
    – Mark Mayo
    Jul 13, 2012 at 15:59
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    Do we really need to name and shame the unfortunate user who got deleted on his own request. I am not saying that I agree on his/her behaviour, but lets consider it water under the bridge and address the user as se does user12345.
    – user141
    Jul 15, 2012 at 10:53
  • I'm not interested in who the user was, nor do I really think I have any opinion on what happened. And I'm not saying you can do anything custom; I expected the process to be automated. However, the stackoverflow.com system can/has been observed to be different from the stackexchange.com branche.
    – Jacco
    Jul 15, 2012 at 16:38
  • @Andra I wanted to make a full disclosure since it was asked for.
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Jul 16, 2012 at 13:45
  • @Jacco Is this difference that you mention for users that delete their own account or accounts that were deleted by moderators?
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Jul 16, 2012 at 13:47
  • @AnkurBanerjee, it could be that this is indeed the difference I observed. However, I cannot verify this, because I do not know the causes of deletion.
    – Jacco
    Jul 16, 2012 at 16:20
  • Can't be a user who deleted their own account - self-deletion is only possibly when that account has never voted or posted. I should also note that any differences between SO and other SE sites are site settings, not system-based (the codebases were merged a long time ago), and user deletion is not affected by these settings.
    – waiwai933
    Jul 17, 2012 at 3:49
  • Well then I'm stumped. Maybe you should raise this on Meta StackOverflow.
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Jul 17, 2012 at 9:51
  • There is no difference in terms of how accounts are removed between self-deleted and moderator-deleted accounts.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Aug 1, 2012 at 21:31
  • That's a relief. When I saw that I thought it was saying that MY account was suspended. I'm thinking "What did I do?" Maybe that flag in your history should be linked to a help article explaining what it means.
    – JohnFx
    Jan 8, 2014 at 23:20

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