Are down votes removed from reputation after a question is removed by its author?
This provides tons of great information -- but in some circles has reputation on being hard on the users who post questions. If you allowed questions to be deleted, and no longer consider the damage to reputation, this might allow a more graceful exit...
Please note I used support in the spirit of explaining how an existing feature works.
Any votes (up or down) are not calculated into reputation after a post is deleted:
All non-deleted posts are factored into the reputation calculation. This also includes downvoters - when an answer is deleted, any user who downvoted it would gain back 1 reputation.
If a deleted post is undeleted, then it will affect the reputation of all involved again.
With all that said, downvotes on deleted posts are still counted towards calculating a post ban. If a user has a history of posts that are not well-received (score of zero or lower) then the system automatically imposes a temporary ban. There are two separate ones: for questions and for answers. Deleting a downvoted post will not help with this. In fact, it might make things worse. The algorithm for imposing a ban is not known (to avoid gaming it) but in general, deleting content is received poorly. It is always better to attempt to improve a post.
For more information on post bans, see the FAQ entry: What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?
Reputation is calculated based on existing active posts.
Deleted posts have their entire contribution to reputation removed, both for up and downvotes.
As a remark, mass deletion of posts is not justified.
