I found a way to earn reputation by downvoting. Specifically: If I downvote a post, then wait a while, then un-downvote the post, my net reputation count increases by 1.   Here's why it's happening. Two days ago, I posted an answer to  question on math.SE. It became a "hot" network question and I quickly reached my daily reputation limit. Thus, the question kept getting upvoted, but I wasn't earning reputation for it (as it should be).   Today, I once again reached my daily reputation limit. After reaching this limit, I downvoted a post on math.SE. So, my daily earned reputation was effectively 199. The next time somebody upvoted my question, I gained +1 reputation. But then, I retracted the downvote. To my surprise, I gained another +1 reputation.   Here is the data on the reputation I gained today:    Usually, I would have earned 215 in total: 200 reputation from upvotes and 15 from one accepted answer. But instead I earned 216 because I gained the extra +1 from retracting the downvote after already being "reimbursed".  Obviously, this trick isn't widely applicable. A user has to already have reached their reputation cap. And due to the limit of 40 votes per day, they would only be able to use this trick to earn a maximum of 40 bonus reputation points per day. I realize I'm not the first to point out inconsistencies in the voting system (see , , ). But as far as I can tell, this is the first instance where it is possible for a user to reliably game the system to earn 40 reputation per day without making any contributions.   Is this a bug? Should it be addressed?
124192
I just experienced a minor visual bug.  I had an answer that earned 2 down votes and 22+ upvotes, earning me the daily maximum of +200. Upon making some edits to the answer at the behest of the comments, one of the users who down voted changed their vote. Now my reputation meter shows that I gained +202 for the day.    This correctly did NOT affect my reputation, as I still only gained 200, so it is merely a minor display bug.  This appears in the achievements drop down and my reputation tab on my profile.
28970
I just bought "Reputation to the max". I bought this first, because I really want to help the cleanup of the vote-to-close queue, which, despite the efforts I've been hearing about, is still quite large. According to SO, my reputation is now 15,750, but that queue still says I need at least 3k rep to review! That is clearly a bug!
107886
Many times when I read threads, I keep on upvoting for the reason being that if someone has put an effort to write a big answer, s/he/it should get some rewards for it.  I recently saw someone getting suspended for voting irregularities.   So, I was wondering if I use the total amount of votes allowed per day, daily, will I be suspended?
34661
Upvoting requires 15 reputation, but the association bonus is taken into account, so if you have at least 200 reputation on any site, you can upvote on all sites in the network.  This is a bit problematic when it comes to per-site metas. The votes there are used to gauge the opinion of the community, and they are often taken into account when implementing new policies.  What can happen is that a post from a per-site meta is linked in an unrelated high-traffic chat room, usually because there is some entertaining drama going on or because someone posted a particularly bad idea. This can lead to an influx of votes from external users that usually wouldn't visit or use the site, but currently still can vote on their meta due to the association bonus.  I think a very low minimum participation on the site should be required to vote on meta issues. This would make the votes on the per-site meta more robust and less easily skewed by being linked from outside.  Not counting the association bonus for the upvote privilege would be enough, then all users would have to earn 14 reputation on the site itself.
41172
Is there any way of getting to the first 15 reputation (at which point you can actually do something) on Stack Overflow other than by asking questions?  My problem is this: if I see a good answer that works, I can't vote for it (not enough reputation).  I have been programming for many years and often see a question I could contribute, but I can't (not enough reputation).  I so far have never needed to ask a question (I know how to use a search facility, and so can find an already existing answer).    Therefore asking questions can't possibly be the only mechanism to get enough reputation to get started, can it?  Because if it is then as more and more questions get asked on Stack Overflow, the need to ask new ones will diminish, so if this is the only mechanism of gaining those first few reputation, soon all new joiners will never be able to contribute, or will need to re-ask already answered questions (not good for anyone).  Advice on how to get those first few reputation gratefully received.
96812
I was reviewing First Posts just now, and I received the following message after my 20th vote:     Thank you for reviewing 20 First Posts today; come back in 8 hours to continue reviewing.   I see other users, with far lower reputation than me, .  Why is it I only have 20 votes?  I saw the  question, but the accepted answer there mentions flag weight, and I was under the impression that Flag Weight is gone (since it is no longer visibile on my profile).  What is the formula that determines the number of First Post votes a person can get per day?
79284
I understand that reputation can be gained by answering questions. However, it seems that more often than not the questions do not contain all the required information to give an answer. Since new users can not comment questions and ask for more details, this creates a sort of catch-22.  Any good advice on how to get initial reputation, given the new user restrictions?
10515
Probably everybody who is very active on SO has experienced cases of random, serial upvoting as the expression of thanks from a (usually newbie) user. The pattern is usually 5 or more upvotes on your latest answers. The upvotes will be detected within 24 hours, and removed. (Or so I assume.)  No harm done except maybe a minor irritation for people after one of the &quot;rep cap&quot; badges because they are shown a higher reputation than they actually have. Still, I was thinking whether, in an attempt to channel the positive attitude into more productive areas, it would be worth showing a tooltip on the third upvote for the same person within time frame x:  Please use one upvote, a comment, or some quality content of your own, to say thank you Large numbers of upvotes for the same user may become invalid as part of our spam detection mechanisms.  Does this make sense? Maybe it is too localized and rare, but it has happened to me three or four times in the last two weeks alone. You decide.  Clarification: I am not advocating putting up any kind of barrier on upvotes. . I'm suggesting informing people of the barrier and the futility of their ten or so upvotes for a single person because those votes are likely to be revoked.  Update: @devinb makes the good point that &quot;saying thanks&quot; is not the only possible reason for serial upvoting, and the message wouldn't make sense then. The point still stands: Your votes aren't going to count, and when it comes to up voting (which is always some sort of positive behaviour, however misguided if done indiscriminately) I think it's fair to inform people of this.
50794
This was a question I originally intended to ask before .  According to , paying for a bounty will actually reduce your reputation cap. I searched more recent posts, but the majority of posts that deal with both reputation caps and bounty are about the reputation you earn from the bounty, not that lost from payment. Is this accurate to what actually occurs?  My main concerns draw from the following pool of questions.   Does paying a bounty actually reduce the reputation cap still? After paying a bounty, am I considered to "reach" the reputation cap after getting 200 reputation worth of upvotes, or getting a net daily gain of +200 reputation from upvotes? After paying a bounty, am I considered to "exceed" the reputation cap after getting over 200 reputation from non-bounty sources, or getting a net daily gain of over +200 reputation from non-bounty sources? Can tactical bounty assignment be used to aid in avoiding the criteria for certain cap-related badges?   There were a few other questions I figured, but they could all be derived from the answers to the above questions.
78692
I noticed a minor issue - or does this affect the epic and legendary badge calculation?  I just open the  and noticed:  rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 26 days earned at least 200 reputation on 23 days   That is impossible. My rep was capped on 26 days but I reached 200 on only 23 days? It would make sense the other way around.
41231
Every so often I appear to have a random reputation gain of 1. It just happened on math.stackexchange and I know that I didn't get downvoted by anyone in between. Any ideas of how that happens?
121139
I received a  badge for an  with 9 upvotes and 1 downvotes for a net of 8 points. Awarding this badge during the upvote revocation timeout period seems like a bug to me.
45174
I like the community and appreciate the great service it's been to me over the past few months.  Sometimes I want to show my support for a great answer or comment, but I can't because I'm a new user and have only 1 reputation. It seems like the only way to gain the requisite 15 reputation (for voting) is to ask questions?  Until now I didn't have any questions that weren't already answered by the community. Is this the only way? Won't this one day lead to no new users not being able to participate?
1120
As a new user, I find it impossible to contribute to the community or to even begin contributing. I know why the reputation system is in place and I respect it, but at the same time it is too hard on new users.  It started with me wanting to upvote a question...     "Vote Up requires 15 reputation"   Just to appreciate a good question that helped me I need 15 rep? OK..., so I find out how I can get reputation points. More or less, I need to ask a question for +5 and add an answer for +10. I don't have any questions at the moment and I don't want to spam a random question, but I did happen to have a slightly different answer to the earlier question that I wanted to upvote. So I try to answer...     This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.   Now... I know this doesn't apply to every question, but at the same time, this means I'm forced to answer yet another question, and I don't want to go around looking for random questions and spam irrelevant answers...  Now I'm stuck. So I try to talk to some other users in the chat rooms about how to go about getting reputation points and how they first started. I entered into a "casual chat room".     You must have 20 reputation on Meta Stack Overflow to talk here.   Yes... I can understand why this is enforced, because we don't want new users to spam chat rooms, but all I wanted to do was ask for help. So I can't even talk to anyone about my newbie problems. So okay, I'll just settle for upvoting comments in the question that helped me. I don't see an upvote hover-over button so I can't even do that.    So now I'm stuck at 1 reputation point, unable to cross that 15 rep barrier, and even after posting this question I'll only have 6 rep points and still unable to do anything, and I'll be forced to look for questions to answer. Yes, I should be contributing to the community, but I shouldn't need to begin answering or making questions to upvote questions and answers. This only spurs more spam/irrelevant answers if anything.   Very, very, very new-user unfriendly.
11026
When you cap, you don't see any upvotes you get on your profile, therefore, you don't have any update on how your questions / answers are doing unless you look at them manually.   Capping the 200 daily rep is not a reason to stop posting here so could I get notified somehow that my posts are being voted on ? Maybe put a little +X in a different color letting me know that I got these votes but I won't get the reputation for it.   I can go and see in my reputation feed inside my profile and see it :    So I don't see why it wouldn't show up in the feed above.  Maybe putting the feed button green without any +X just like when you aquire a badge.
82495
I've had a few concerns over a new form of &quot;spam&quot; - that is, through voting. A while back, I had seen some wild reputation increases to my account, amongst others, that seemingly felt weird - as I've barely participated in asking questions or providing answers. Earlier today, this sentiment was echoed by another user in chat:  and like 250 this month? it seems like someone is spam upvoting  This was another user that saw a 250 rep increase, but has been inactive for quite a while. For a site that hasn't seen more than 5 questions a day, that was really weird. To put things even more out of hand, it seems like each vote has been placed on a question.  I did some investigation of my own, and it seems like I've found a badge hunter. More of a... gold badge hunter. This user is among the top 3 voters of the site. Looking into this user's profile, this user only has under 200 rep, and has posted a single question, which was received differently. One thing caught my eye:  Votes all time              by type 581   up              535    question 1     down            47     answer   Each vote is an up vote (with the exception of one), and there are 535 up votes on questions. There are 535 questions in the entire site. Using reputation stats from user profiles, I came with the conclusion that these votes are...  Done within a short period of time. 5 question votes within a couple of minutes Done in [near] perfect chronological order: The earlier the vote, the earlier the question was asked. As if the user had gone through the list of questions in order, and placed an up vote on each one.   I see this as incredibly problematic. First:  It dangerously inflates reputation. Votes are not done based on their content, but simply for voting. Therefore, reputation loses it value as a way to measure expertise.  It's like serial up voting. Generally, when we hear the term &quot;serial up voting&quot;, we think of a voting ring, where one user continuously up votes another. This is negative for the targeted user. Well, here, we've got a voting ring with the site and this user. A user continuously up votes the site, causing negative damage for the site.  We mix good and bad content. Since low quality questions are a victim of the voting spree, many get meddled with the rest of &quot;good quality&quot; questions, despite being closed as off-topic, too broad, or whatever the reason. We can no longer reliably sort questions by quality with the very system that was designed to help us.   ... And the rest of voting fraud issues outlined in .  I've got a couple questions on this:  Is this comparable to serial voting? Should such votes be reversed? How should we determine whether or not to reverse them?  Should we stop this? Let it be? Is this really that big of a problem for sites? (I would argue that it's less of an issue for graduated sites that receive large amounts of content, but what about beta sites that rarely see more than a few questions a day)
102591
Yesterday I had 3,606 reputation but today I have 3,592.  My profile shows that I lost 6 reputation when a user was removed, but that would put me on 3,600 - 8 reputation has magically disappeared.  Adding up all of my reputation does work out at 3,591 (I'm assuming by default new users have 1 rep, so that would make sense).  Somewhere a reputation change since yesterday isn't being displayed. I don't know what this would be for, but -8 would lead me to believe that someone removed their up-vote on an answer I'd posted which already had a down-vote (could it be from that deleted user?).  I don't know if this is a bug or if there is simply a delay between reputation updating, but I figured it was worth reporting.    Sadly I cannot prove that I had 3,606 reputation yesterday.