Find out whether a user has association bonus

Question

I searched for this in the api docs and on this page but couldn't find any information:

I have an api token of a given user. Is there a way to find out whether this user has association bonus rights?

I know that I could just look whether a user has more than 200 rep on any site but this is error prone because one can also have the association bonus with less reputation when you lost it again.

Answer 1

Yes, you can find out if the user has received the association bonus using the API. It's a bit clunky though.

However, as we discovered, "association bonus rights" are rather meaningless at the moment. Otherwise, you'd be able to edit wikis, upvote, comment, and flag on Information Security Stack Exchange right now, despite currently only having 1 rep there.

If the association "rights" persisted, then you could use the API's /users/{id}/privileges route to see if you had, say, the Edit Community Wiki privilege despite not having 100 rep.

However, they currently do not stick, and I've created a bug report on Meta SE which you might want to review (and upvote).

Using the /users/{ids}/reputation-history route to see if the association bonus was given:

The /users/{ids}/reputation-history route will show if the user has received the association_bonus. Example:
    /reputation-history#ids=169072&site=security

Unfortunately, a user may have thousands of reputation events, and there is no way to filter, nor change the sorting of, that route's output.

Fortunately:

1. Although the order can't be changed, the results do appear to be sorted by creation_date.
2. In most cases, the user will get the bonus within the first 200, or so, events.

So, a recipe for seeing if the user has the bonus might go like this:

1. Get the user's total number of events like:
     /2.2/users/331508/reputation-history?site=stackoverflow&filter=!--pn9sU*3FRx

   Result: ... "total": 7192

2. Divide the total by 100 and add 1 to get the number of pages. In this case, 72.

3. Fetch the last page like:
     /2.2/users/331508/reputation-history?page=72&pagesize=100&site=stackoverflow&filter=!9Z(-x-d4A

   Result: entry not yet present.

4. If the results do not contain the association_bonus entry fetch the penultimate page:
     /2.2/users/331508/reputation-history?page=71&pagesize=100&site=stackoverflow&filter=!9Z(-x-d4A

   Result: association_bonus entry found.

5. The association_bonus entry will almost always be there. If not, continue fetching pages off the end until you are satisfied.

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Notes:

1. The /users/{ids}/reputation route won't work because it only reports (some) rep changes associated with posts.
2. There is no easy way to detect the bonus in SEDE.