A friend keeps whining about "losing n reputation points" on Stack Exchange.
My instinctive interpretation is that some of the votes he had earned were reversed due to vote fraud. What he really means, though, is that he hit the daily reputation limit and can't take advantage of up votes that are still coming in.
What is a better phrase to use to talk about points lost due to the rep cap? Something similarly short, but less confusing.
Best Answer
Your friend missed out on those points. This idiom is commonly used to indicate missed opportunity, though it doesn't suggest specifically how that opportunity was missed.
If you find his experience was unfair to his position, you could say he was shorted or short-changed those lamented points: he was given less than was fair, depriving him of the full reward of his work.