Why has my Reputation score suddenly changed?

Question

Perhaps you've noticed an unexpected change in your reputation recently. For some of us this may be particularly significant, and for others it may be less noticeable. Please know that this is not your fault or any kind of penalty from the site or Moderation Team.

The Site and Community Moderators are sad to share that a network of nearly fifty artificial accounts has been detected on the BH.SE network, which has generated a substantial number of Questions and Answers over the past 18 months.

After concerns from some in the community we identified that one of the site's most prominent contributors appears to have coordinated this network, for reasons that are as yet unclear. This user has been suspended as we continue to assess the issue and agree a path forward. The moderation team has sought responses from the user to explain their actions and motives.

This network has not only been generating significant quantities of artificial content on the network, but has also been targeting and upvoting content, with unusual sophistication to avoid usual pattern detection. So for every targeted vote, four or five other votes were distributed somewhere in the network, possibly to some of your own posts.

As we wind down the activity of these falsified accounts these votes will disappear, and everybody's Rep will be recalculated fairly. The Questions and Answers have all been merged into the name of the network's coordinator, where previously it would have appeared under many different names. Much of this low quality content will be removed where it is deemed of no value to the community.

Please accept our apologies for not detecting this issue sooner. On the bright side, this means that going forward all content you post will not be "drowned out" by low quality posts, and so you should be able to expect better engagement with real people and better recognition of actual quality content.

Please respect the seriousness of this situation - disappointment and frustration are good and right responses in this moment, but please do observe the Code of Conduct in any comments or responses you choose to offer, or they will be removed as usual.

Thanks again to all our genuine contributors and for all that you have done and continue to do to make BH.SE a great place to ask and answer questions.

Answer 1

So any big event like this impacts the rest of the community, not only through changes to their reputation, but also possibly through the deletion of their answers.

This network produced many great questions that showed particular insight into Biblical texts and asked interesting and penetrating questions of those texts. But the network also produced some low or very low quality posts. Some of them had already been dealt with before, but many hadn't. We like to be welcoming of new people here, and so we overlook many flaws in their posts as long as the general message is understandable. But now those posts look like they have come from an experienced member, and it's harder to overlook their flaws. The network posted a whole lot of previously unnoticed duplicates, as well as some questions which are unmotivated by the texts in question, have big leaps in unexplained logic, are (borderline) off-topic, or which appear to have been posted under a fake persona. This content is not what we want on this site, and leaving it around could set a bad example of what this site is like. Ideally we would like to remove the worst of these questions.

When a question on its own merits is high quality, and it has received high quality answers from others, then we'll almost certainly just leave it all alone.

When a question is very low quality, and it hasn't really received any answers that look particularly insightful or that look like they involved much time to research, then we may just delete the whole thing. If possible we'll look for a duplicate question and move the answers to it. If we can move answers to a duplicate question you may still loose some reputation points if your answer was previously accepted.

If a question is particularly egregious (and many of them have already been closed), we may decide to delete it even if it has high quality answers. As above, we'll look for another question to move them to if possible, but that's often not the case. But there are some questions which are really just absolutely bottom shelf in quality, and I don't believe any of the people who answered them would have done so if it hadn't been posted by what appeared to be a new community member. In this case we might just delete the question and its answers.

I hope that you'll be understanding as we try to carefully clean up here. No doubt we'll delete some questions which you wouldn't if you were in our position. If you notice that one of your answers has been deleted and you'd really prefer that it be preserved, then please write a custom flag on the deleted answer asking us to reconsider. We'll look if there's another question the answer could be moved to, or we can just undelete the question if that's the only option.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.