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I have a thing that is bugging me for the time being. I just discovered that there is an option called "show removed posts". And when I enabled it, I saw (-2) rep corresponding to several of my posts.... check out the Link here. Yes I know that when a post edited by me gets deleted or removed, I lose the 2 rep I got for the edit. But now on seeing the linked page, I am confused if this means that apart from losing the 2 rep I had got for the edit, I also lose an additional 2 rep for editing a post that got removed. I don't know but is this speculation of mine true?

I mean that the rep written beside a particular post usually denotes the net rep gained from it. So (-2) rep must mean that I have lost 2 rep in total...whereas it should have been so that I lost the 2 rep I gained from the post...that is the net rep beside the removed posts must be 0.

So am I right? What is actually happening?

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There is no reputation penalty for editing a post that gets removed. Your reputation is simply adjusted to what it would have been without that edit.

More generally, I don't think the number beside a post in the rep list denotes the net reputation gained from it. What you see in the list is mostly individual reputation-change events - individual upvotes, downvotes, accepts, edits, bounties, etc. But when a post is deleted or a user is removed, your reputation is adjusted to what it would have been without that post or user, and the adjustment is a single event no matter how many events contributed to giving you that reputation in the first place. (For example, if a post of yours gets upvoted 5 times and then deleted, you see 5 upvote events giving +10 rep each but only one removal event giving -50 rep.)

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks...I got it. $\endgroup$
    – SchrodingersCat
    Sep 29 '15 at 14:57
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    $\begingroup$ Note that the reuptation change widget in top-bar does show the net change due to some set of recent events, which might be a source of confusion: the two displays have some visual similarities, but they are functionally different. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Sep 29 '15 at 15:00

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