# How can year reputation be higher than total reputation?

Looking at the 2019 user reputation league, this year's highest-ranked user is dfhwze (deservedly so, having put a lot of work into code reviewing this year).

There's a strange anomaly, though: at time of writing, this user has 12,999 total reputation, but somehow has 13,059 year reputation. Where did the 60 extra points for the year come from, that aren't included in the total reputation?

The user you're talking about has joined five months ago. In that time they offered five bounties for a total of 500 reputation and earned three bounties for a total of 350 reputation.

Now let's look at the breakdown:

12,999 rep total
+  500 rep offered in bounties (earned but lost)
-  350 rep gained in bounties  (gained but not "earned")
-  100 rep association bonus   (gained but not "earned")
+   10 rep ? caching ? (probably an answer upvote not yet reflected)
13,059 rep this year


Note that this is just me piecing together the information in a way that would make sense, and in no way meant to be authoritative

• This looks right, they have gotten 10 reputation today - so may be cached from yesterday. – Peilonrayz Oct 31 '19 at 13:06
• I didn't realise that bounty points didn't count in the reputation leagues; this explanation makes sense. – Toby Speight Oct 31 '19 at 13:46
• I don't think this answer is correct, I have posted a new answer explaining what I think the mechanic is. – Peilonrayz Oct 31 '19 at 20:47

I thought it could be a weird one month off bug - as dfhwze had 13059 reputation on Sep 30 at 00:00 UTC+0. If you work backwards you can see this.

However this isn't correct. I checked if this were the case with another user so I also looked at Mast's reputation. I chose Mast as I know they've been active in the last month, but have fairly low year long activity (easy to manually add together). Totaling the reputation changes:

• Year: 749
• Month: 215
• Day: 90

The reputation league shows them as having 659 reputation this year. Which evidently shows this hypothesis looks incorrect, as 749 - 215 (534) is quite a way off.

However it looks to explain where the extra 10 reputation in Vogel612's answer comes from, this is as 749 - 90 (659) is what SE reports as the yearly gain for Mast.

• I'm glad I could be of service. – Mast Oct 31 '19 at 19:15

The difference is because of deleted posts or them downvoting other answers.

I came to this conclusion by looking at various users reputations at the end of their first year/month/week. I saw a couple of patterns and now feel my answer is fairly strong 'proof', putting only myself under scrutiny.

TR = Total Reputation
YR = Year Reputation (it works the same for week and quarter too)

1. Do either include the starting 1 rep? TR: Yes, YR: No.

My first week of Code Review I got 40 reputation. As you can see that put my total reputation to 41, but my week reputation only went up by 40.

I think I should note, I technically got one rep a year earlier. But you can verify the same with users that joined and got reputation that week.

In my first year of Code Review I downvoted an answer once. I downvoted on the 14th of December 2015, and you can see it in the history!
The week ending 12-12-2015 I had 3,100 reputation, but the week ending 19-12-2015 I had 3,289 reputation, gaining 190 that week. The -1 from the downvote is plane as day.

3. Do either include bounties and association bonuses? TR: Yes, YR: Yes.

Manually totaling my reputation from the reputation tab (logged in and with show removed posts ticked) totals to 3,473. Add the starting 1 reputation and you have my TR - 3,474. My YR however was 3,494.

Below are the bounties and association bonus tied to my first year.

• Jul 6 '15
+100 - Association Bonus
• Jul 12 '15
+50 - Bounty
• Nov 1 '15
+25 - Bounty

I started no bounties my first year. So to get both high enough they both have to include them.

4. Do deleted posts change the score? TR: When undeleted, YR: Yes.

The ways that my private reputation tab differs from my public one in 2015:

• Jul 18 '15
+10
• Oct 8 '15
+10
• Oct 9 '15
+10
• Oct 12 '15
-20
• Dec 14 '15
-1

And so we can clearly see that deleted posts affect both reputations. And we can now clearly see why I got 20 more YR then TR my first year.

• I did a search on deleted:1 and have lost 10 rep from deleted answers. – dfhwze Oct 31 '19 at 20:54
• @dfhwze Wow, I didn't even know that existed! :O From your user profile I can see you have the potential to have lost a maximum of 349 reputation from downvotes, so maybe that comes into this? There may also be another mechanic I've yet to unravel. But I don't particularly want to scrutinize you at all, never mind to the level I did myself. – Peilonrayz Oct 31 '19 at 21:02
• @dfhwze that doesn't seem to be right, from what I can tell. IIRC users can only search for their own deleted posts up to a certain timeframe since deletion, so that could explain why your search results differ from mine – Vogel612 Oct 31 '19 at 21:04
• @Vogel612 My deleted answers combined have one more upvote than downvote. Do you know the timeframe? I can browse back to when I started being active on CR. – dfhwze Oct 31 '19 at 21:08
• @dfhwze Upvotes are +10, downvotes are -2. – Peilonrayz Oct 31 '19 at 21:08
• The I'm sure you could count the number of answers I downvoted where I answered :) I won't go through them to verify Answers (379) – dfhwze Oct 31 '19 at 21:15
• Interesting a downvote. Anything about the above that you think is particularly wrong? – Peilonrayz Nov 1 '19 at 19:27