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Scenario: there was an incorrect answer to the question How to take the cube root of a negative number in VBA for Excel? (The answerer had not read the question carefully before replying.) I downvoted it and left a comment explaining why.

Now, the next day, the answer and my comment are gone. I assume the original person deleted the answer, which automatically made my comment vanish. But my reputation is still -1, and the downvote no longer appears on my profile. This means that the totals for calculating my rep don't match the report in my profile, which is broken.

I hereby suggest that if the item that was downvoted (question or answer) is deleted within some reasonable time, say 96 hours, of the downvote, the missing rep be restored.

I realize that this is a feature request for the underlying Stack Exchange software and if this question needs to be moved, I have no problem with that. I haven't participated much in any meta and I may be posting in the wrong place.

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Deleting a question now triggers an automated reputation recalc - so the if a post gets deleted; the votes are removed and your reputation should recalc and restore automatically.

You can also run a manual reputation recalc on your own account.

Go to the bottom of the page. Compare the rep you have now and the rep the report says you will have when you run the recalculation.

Click Trigger Reputation Recalc when you're ready.

This will restore all your rep from downvotes on deleted answers. It will also remove any rep you had on answers or questions that have also been deleted.

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  • Shouldn't this be more obvious, though?
    – CarlF
    Jul 15, 2011 at 15:35
  • Oh. In that case ... never mind. The feature I asked for already existed.
    – CarlF
    Jul 15, 2011 at 16:51
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    @Kyle I don't know where you got that information, but I believe there are no automatic recalculations except for when the vote-fraud detections are triggered and a few other very rare occasions.
    – DMA57361
    Jul 15, 2011 at 17:12
  • @dma so if you don't manually recalculate your rep or ask a mod to do to recalc you will never get that rep back??? Jul 15, 2011 at 17:37
  • Just figured it had to be done automatically at some point or everyones rep would be inaccurate... nightly when the badges are awarded made sense to me... Jul 15, 2011 at 17:44
  • @Kyle, yep, the normalised rep values visible on the site are often wrong, sometimes by large amounts. And it's not that you'll never get it back, but the time would be indeterminate. Bare in mind this also works the other way around - you don't lose rep if one of your questions or answers is deleted until a recalc either.
    – DMA57361
    Jul 15, 2011 at 18:25

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