I have recently taken some questions about MaplePrimes reputation scores, and coincidentally, there was a discussion about it within MaplePrimes yesterday. I wanted to address these issues, and thought that doing so as a separate post made sense.

Reputation was added back in 2010 as a mechanism to track how fellow users value your contributions, and I believe it has largely worked. It's become a great way to acknowledge the time and effort our members put into the community, and I know that many of you greatly value the scores that you have earned. I also know that it is never fun to see it drop, even by just a few points.

To be clear, there are only two ways to lose reputation:

• If someone upvoted your answer/reply and then later rescinded the upvote
• If someone marked your answer as the "best" answer, and then later changed their vote to another answer

This means you can only lose reputation points if someone undoes an action that gave you points in the first place. This is going to happen occasionally. For example, the user may have voted your answer “best”, but as the discussion continued, someone else posted a different solution that the user felt was even better. So you can expect to see small fluctuations from day to day, but the overall trend will be upward. 

That said, members get understandably concerned when their reputation drops, and want to know why. We have always been able to track when reputation changed, but “why it changed” was obscured. Starting today, we have added enhanced logging for reputation shifts. This will allow us to better diagnose the causes when a member is concerned about a change to their reputation points. As well, in the very unlikely event that there is malicious behavior on MaplePrimes, this will give also us the data we need to take action to protect the community.