up vote 4 down vote favorite

Under what circumstances does the community user upvote answers?

As a side note, why does it not have the civic duty badge?

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It doesnt earn any badges, collect tags, or anything. 4 – Simon Sheehan Jan 13 at 20:55
Well, it can't collect tags because it does not ask or answer questions, but why does it not get civic duty for voting? – soandos Jan 13 at 21:03
@soandos Maybe badges are only actually awarded (retroactively) when logging in. And Community never logs in. – Daniel Beck Jan 13 at 21:05
@SimonSheehan That's not entirely true. Community gets reputation from accepted answers of questions that were migrated and whose users don't have an account here. Community also has flag weight, presumably due to anonymous users' flagging (if this is possible). And Community owns down votes (and possibly up votes?) of deleted posts. – Daniel Beck Jan 13 at 21:07
@DanielBeck I phrased that poorly - it just doesn't display the information on "its" profile – Simon Sheehan Jan 13 at 21:18
Probably a dumb question, but if Community is "not really a person"... who writes the edit summaries? – iglvzx Jan 14 at 2:03
@iglvzx it's an automated process. Ever edited a post without entering anything in the summary? No? Check it out. – Sathya♦ Jan 14 at 5:55
@DanielBeck Community has a flag weight because there are certain triggers that automagically flag low quality stuff. Whenever those are dealt with, Community's flag weight can change – Ivo Flipse♦ Jan 14 at 14:56
@Ivo those "low quality post, score 78" things on the review page? – Daniel Beck Jan 14 at 15:03
Well it also flags things like posts that get too many comments, users who didn't accept our FAQ, stuff like that yeah – Ivo Flipse♦ Jan 14 at 18:57
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1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Community user holds votes of all deleted posts, deleted users, votes on posts which have been migrated but the owner of the post doesn't have an account.

It also holds the votes on Community wiki posts. As for the badges - no definite answer here but I assume negative user ids aren't considered while the badge calculation runs (note that the Community user id is -1)

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On MSO it only down votes on deleted posts. And look at the numbers,they don't make sense. – Daniel Beck Jan 14 at 9:51
Thanks for the reference. – Daniel Beck Jan 14 at 10:31
Community user is probably just an easy way to implement all this stuff (like automatic downvotes), what the result of that implementation is, isn't really relevant – Ivo Flipse♦ Jan 14 at 14:57
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