Reputation_change has the historical total rather than the daily delta?

Question

I'm trying to use the reputation API to get the recent reputation delta for a given user. For example, looking at recent entries for /2.2/users/21539/reputation, one has:

{
    on_date: 1447018487,
    reputation_change: 2600,
    vote_type: "up_votes",
    post_type: "answer",
    post_id: 303231,
    user_id: 21539
}

It's showing a huge reputation change of 2600 for this answer, which is the total reputation gain since the answer was written in 2008 (10 x 260). Instead, I expected it to be just 10, for the upvote that happened on that one day.

Or am I misunderstanding the semantic of this field? If so, how would I get the recent delta, as is displayed on the reputation tab for a user?

Answer 1

It's a bit confusing but that is not a bug.
Think of it as, "Reputation change from when to when?"

Since you specified neither a fromdate, nor a todate, you are effectively asking for the changes for all time.

If you run the query for Nov 1, 2015 to Nov 9, 2015:

          /2.2/users/21539/reputation?fromdate=1446336000&todate=1447027200

You get:

"on_date": 1447018487,
"reputation_change": 10,
"vote_type": "up_votes",
"post_type": "answer",
"post_id": 303231,
"user_id": 21539

Which agrees with the timeline:

Reference:

• the doc page for /users/{ids}/reputation
• The reputation object

See also, the /users/{ids}/reputation-history route.