How does the reputation points system work?

Reputation is an indication of how much the community (and therefore the system) trusts you. You can never gain reputation by 'gold farming'— reputation is earned by doing things that other people find useful.

Here's the simple version:

• Upvotes are worth +12.
• Downvotes cost you -6, and cost the voter -2.
• New users get 15 upvotes per day. Users with at least 10 reputation have 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes per day.
• You are limited to earning 200 points from upvotes per day.

That works great most of the time, but there are some very popular questions that attract a lot of votes, and would skew the system if we didn't compensate for it. So once a post gets five votes in a direction, things change a little bit:

• For the first 5 votes in a direction, upvotes are +12 and downvotes are -6.
• For the next 6-10 votes, up is +4 and down is -2.
• After 11 votes, all upvotes are +2 and downvotes are -1.

The system takes care of the calculation for you, so you don't need to worry about this scaling too much. It only applies to a very small percentage of questions.

• When you accept an answer, you get +10 points.
• When your answer is accepted, you get +30 points.

Flagging items as inappropriate or requiring moderator attention is the most effective way to keep our community positive and hold spam at bay.

• You can't flag posts until you have 30 reputation.
• Flagging posts costs -2
• Once a post has been flagged by several people, it is automatically removed.
• Points spent flagging posts are returned to you when a post is removed.
• If your post is marked as inappropriate and removed, you are docked -100 points.

• Every time someone successfully follows a guide to fix something, we award +30 points to the authors.
• Every time someone links to one of your guides in Answers, and that post is upvoted, 10 points are distributed to the authors.
• Our algorithm automatically calculates how much you have contributed to your guides.
• The points are divvied up amongst each author that has contributed at least 10% to a guide.
• You are limited to 200 points from guides per day. This reputation limit is separate from the Answers limit.

Here's an example:

• Alice started the guide, but over time it's grown and her contribution is now 60%
• Bob has made a lot of improvements and added new photos, contributing 36% of the total
• Mallory contributed a few minor edits totaling 4%

If Jane successfully fixes her widget using the guide, Alice will get +18 points and Bob will get +12. Mallory would not gain any points until she made more substantial changes to the guide.

If the guide has prerequisites, we award another +30 points to the authors of the prerequisite guides.

We haven't yet figured out a way to award reputation for editing wiki pages and adding devices. There are a lot of badges that you can earn for contributing to wikis!

These numbers are neither absolute nor perfect. What we're trying to do here is quite challenging, and I'm sure we didn't get it right the first time. As we learn more and get better at this, we'll update the algorithm and these point values.

As we go forward and allow people to add more kinds of content, we will add more ways of earning reputation. Keeping the points you earn balanced throughout is going to be important, and I'm open to feedback on this. We have high-profile users who have earned all of their points from Answers, people who've earned everything by writing repair guides, and people like Luke who have a mixture of both.