A community member reported a sudden drop in gamification points after installing the plugin, prompting a discussion on potential causes. xomiamoore initially suspected a bug, referencing a past issue on Meta Discourse linked by piffy, though twofoursixeight suggested updating to the latest version — which xomiamoore confirmed they were already on. JammyDodger explained that scores can recalculate due to deleted posts, changed solutions, or category moves — especially if topics are moved between scoring and non-scoring categories. xomiamoore noted the changes were dramatic and didn’t align with deletions, but after investigating, confirmed the issue was misconfigured scorable categories after reorganizing forum structure as suggested by JammyDodger. After fixing the category settings and re-running the backfill, the issue was resolved. xomiamoore thanked the community, especially JammyDodger, and advised others not to make too many changes at once. The root cause was not a bug, but a configuration oversight related to gamification scoring rules.
Hello! I recently installed the gamification plugin, and one of our community members is reporting that his score dropped from over 1060 points all time to 1020-ish. (Full thread here.)
Is there anything that would cause someone to lose points? As far as I can tell, there are only ways to gain points.
Might be relevant. My understanding was this bug was fixed though
I would recommend updating your forum to the latest version as that bug was an outdated bug that was fixed a while ago.
Do you know what version? We’re on 3.1.0.beta6 which is fairly recent.
Wait, this is a new bug? There was an old bug a whole ago, but this bug looks new to me.
The scores do recalculate, so it is possible to see some small dips if posts or topics are deleted for instance, or if solutions are marked and then changed.
That makes sense, but it seems like they are changing dramatically from day to day (I’ve only had the plugin installed for about a week). I did backfill the scores when I first installed it.
Looking at the logs, the user whose points are changing doesn’t seem to align with posts that have been deleted over this time. 
Sometimes scorable categories can be relevant if you don’t have scoring sitewide? Moving topics between scoring and non-scoring categories could account for some changes.
Though I think the last time we were tracking the scoring blip from the previous Contribute > Bug topic it helped to run the backfill again and compare the results. Could you give that a go and see if there’s a difference?
I think this is the issue! I had moved some things into new categories and those weren’t listed as scoreable categories.
I need to talk to my IT team to run the backfill command, but will update here when I can.
The scorable categories were indeed the issue due to reorganizing categories. Note to others, don’t mess with 10 different things at once 
Thank you all and especially @JammyDodger for your help!