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Literally as I started making this question it changed to what it should be, but I'm still curious as to why it was the case:

I had two tabs in Chrome open, one on meta and the other on rpg.stackexchange, and the rpg one (which I had been using) had higher rep. Confused, I closed the meta tab (which had been sitting idle for an hour or so) and in the fresher rpg one, switched over to meta. My rep was still different. I closed the browser and opened one tab in each again - still different. All of this in the space of about 2 minutes, but there was 20 rep difference, which I don't think happened as quickly in this case.

Why would my rep read differently in the different parts of the site?

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    \$\begingroup\$ Are you still seeing this discrepancy? (Currently I see 921 rep both here and on main.) I wonder if the classic “blame caching” is involved, possibly on Chrome’s part. \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:18
  • \$\begingroup\$ I've never heard of "blame caching"... what's that? And no, like I said at the beginning of the question, it fixed itself just as I started asking the question, but I'm still curious as to why it happened... \$\endgroup\$
    – Isaac Reefman
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:33
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    \$\begingroup\$ We’re those tabs that you’d had open and un-touched for a few hours? \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:37
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    \$\begingroup\$ one was, but I closed it, re-opened it, even navigated to the meta site from a constantly active tab, all showed the incorrect number. I thought of that too! \$\endgroup\$
    – Isaac Reefman
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:39
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    \$\begingroup\$ (“Blame caching” is a running joke about weird, unreproducible bugs in SE behaviour. It’s often truly the cause too, but it’s very hard to confirm. It’s because much of SE and the Internet in general is sped up by serving static copies of dynamic pages—called “cached” versions—that are supposed to be updated with clever timing tricks so that the illusion of dynamic pages is preserved. When caching errors happen, you get old copies and weird inconsistencies that are hard to reproduce or even trace the cause. Hence “blame caching” anytime something like this happens… and often it’s correct to.) \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:43
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    \$\begingroup\$ (Chrome caches pages too, and it can forget to ask SE for an updated page even when you’ve told it to, so there are lots of possible ways to have caching errors. What’s amazing is that we see so few.) \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:46
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    \$\begingroup\$ Gotcha. that seems like a more-than-half-decent answer, actually... Should I berate you for answering in the comments? :P \$\endgroup\$
    – Isaac Reefman
    Jul 30, 2018 at 5:53
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    \$\begingroup\$ Normally yes. ;) In the case of odd bugs on meta we’re less concerned with generating ideal Q&A sets and more concerned with getting things solved. I’m afraid I’m not closer to being sure what the issue is after those requests for more information, so I’ll leave it unanswered and tag it [bug] in case dev staff know what caused it and can speak from knowledge instead of the quip to “blame caching”. :) \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jul 30, 2018 at 6:07
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    \$\begingroup\$ Fair enough... You asked a couple of questions I thought the original question clarified to begin with... do you think I should somehow edit the question to make this clearer? \$\endgroup\$
    – Isaac Reefman
    Jul 30, 2018 at 6:09
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    \$\begingroup\$ The approximate age of the tabs involved and whether/how long they were inactive before you noticed the rep discrepancy is possibly helpful to know to someone investigating the bug. There might be an error in how SE signals to Chrome how often to expire its own page caches, for example. \$\endgroup\$
    – SevenSidedDie
    Jul 30, 2018 at 6:12
  • \$\begingroup\$ Let us continue this discussion in chat. \$\endgroup\$
    – Isaac Reefman
    Jul 30, 2018 at 6:21

1 Answer 1

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The reputation on Meta is only updated once an hour.

See for example My “Meta” rep on Photo.SE differs from my main rep on MSE. The highest answer links to "What is Meta?" in the Help Center, which states (emphasis mine):

Votes on meta do not affect your reputation; your meta reputation is the same as your reputation on Stack Overflow (synchronized hourly), though you earn separate badges. You must have 5 reputation to participate on meta.

The same can be seen here on RPG.SE, which is why your reputation only gets updated occasionally. Don't worry about it, it's that there is always a certain amount of time between your main site getting higher and your meta "rep" being shown as higher.

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