I occasionally hit the upvote button on a helpful answer in a community where I don't have upvote privileges. I get the message pop up that says my upvote has been recorded, but will not be displayed due to my low reputation score.
If I eventually earn enough rep to cast an upvote in a given community, will my previous upvotes be counted?
I'm just curious if my non-counted upvotes are ever going to benefit anyone.
No, these votes are not retroactive. If you want your vote to count, you'll have to vote again on the same post once you have privileges. Until then, your attempted vote is simply recorded as "anonymous feedback" and doesn't affect anything on the site.
I do agree that the wording of the error message is a bit confusing, leading to imply that it will actually count as a vote once you earn the required rep. I've asked over on the global meta to have this message changed.
