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After reviewing some user's first answers, occasionally I'll come across that flat-out insult or slur that I know they'll most likely have their account deactivated. After that user is banned, they'll have that greyed-out avatar:

enter image description here

Do I get reputation back from any of their posts that I downvoted?

Related to this is "Do I get my reputation refunded if a bad answer gets deleted?" - it covers deleting answers, but not deactivated users.

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  • Let's start with "You shouldn't be downvoting that anyway!" Apply offensive flags - that's an automatic downvote and it kills the post if enough people flag it!
    – user98085
    Sep 1, 2013 at 0:20
  • 3
    @FEichinger there's no harm in also downvoting, it can even help get it out of the frontpage faster
    – juan
    Sep 1, 2013 at 0:38

2 Answers 2

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That grey avatar does not mean the user is banned, it means the user was deleted or destroyed. The state of the user is irrelevant for your reputation, the state of the posts you downvoted is important.

You get your reputation for downvotes back when those posts are deleted. If a user has only posted offensive or abusive content, they are usually destroyed, which removes the user as well as all of their posts.

If for some reason some offensive or abusive posts remain, just flag them to get them removed, this will also get your reputation back.

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Yes, you do.

You'll see an entry that reads user was removed and your reputation restored.

enter image description here

In that example, I lost reputation because I had an upvote from that user, but in your case you'd see a +1

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  • 11
    Are you sure? If the user is removed, it makes sense that their votes would be undone. But why would removing the user, but not deleting their downvoted post, refund the rep from those downvotes? The downvotes are still there. Sep 1, 2013 at 4:53
  • This shows that your rep was decreased because the user was removed, not increased. Oct 17, 2013 at 20:59

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