What does Reputation do?
As a registered user, your reputation on the site is a part of your identity on the site. It determines, to an extent, respect among your peers, because it can generally only be gained when other users of the site vote up your questions and answers. It also determines a users privileges within the system. As you gain more reputation, the system learns to trust you and bestows new functionality that is restricted from low reputation users.
As a user gains reputation, he will gain the following abilities and responsibilities:
- +15 to upvote
- +15 to mark offensive
- +15 to post images
- +50 to add comments to a post
- +50 to delete your own comments
- +100 to downvote
- +250 to open/close your own questions
- +500 to retag others' questions
- +750 to edit community 'wiki editable' posts
- +2000 to edit others' questions and answers
- +2000 to delete comments from a post
- +2000 to view offensive counts
- +3000 to open/close any question
- +4000 to lock a post (not implemented yet, but coming)
Additionally
- +2000 your website url on your user page is not nofollowed (ref)
How can a user gain or lose Reputation?
Users gain or lose reputation based on how they interact with the system. Primarily this is by asking and answering questions which are voted on by other users. Posts which are voted up earn the user reputation, and posts which are voted down penalize them, although up-votes are more heavily weighted than down-votes. Posts which are marked as "Community Wiki Editable" do not change reputation on up or down votes.
Users gain reputation when:
- Your Question or Answer is voted Helpful: +10 reputation
- Your Answer is marked Accepted: +15 reputation
- You Marked an answer to your question as Accepted: +2 reputation
Users lose reputation when:
- Your Question or Answers is voted Not Helpful: -2 reputation
- You voted a Question or Answer as Not Helpful: -1 reputation
- You wrote the latest revision to a post flagged Offensive 5 times: -100 reputation
- You have multiple user accounts merged. Reputation is recalculated during the merge so you lose reputation gained from questions that have since been deleted.
Additionally:
- All users start with 1 reputation.
- A user's reputation may not drop below 1.
- A maximum of +200 reputation may be gained per day from voting. (A new day starts 0:00 UTC).

