Reputation Crashed, bug or feature?

[Tonka Crash]

I've got a career game with around a few hundred hours. Yesterday I noticed I was being offered contracts, but I couldn't accept any new ones. It finally dawned on me that my reputation was in the toilet at -94% which was severely limiting the number of contracts I could have concurrently and I had more active contracts than the limit. Looking through old saves on the system I found that it changed from +72% to -94% during a 5 hour period (game time) between two of my saves from Monday night. No logs exist because like I say, I didn't notice the problem for a couple days.

I rarely pay attention to reputation. I just avoid killing Kerbals and failing or cancelling contracts if I can help it. This save does have a dead Kerbal (RIP Sanbree), 2 or 3 failed contracts and at least one cancellation, but none in the last couple of weeks. I can't think of anything out of the ordinary that might have happened in the game during the time period where the reputation tanked. I may have turned down a couple contracts, but that isn't unusual for me and I haven't changed my strategies in weeks. But they are set to the options that trade away reputation. Other than updates I haven't changed my mods for this save for a couple weeks.

I may have used the ALT-F12 menu to delete the list of completed contracts. I flushed the archive sometime recently, I just don't remember exactly when and haven't spent the time to compare saves. I've done this several times in the past and thought it was just a housekeeping shortcut to clear the archive of completed contracts.  Does the game need the archive of completed contracts for anything? I'd prefer completed contracts disappear after about a week. The only time I look at it is when a contract completes unexpectedly and I only notice because it's no longer in the list of active contracts. 

I have no problem taking a hit to the reputation for things that I know I did (or failed to do), but something like this where the reputation seemed to flip-flop for no reason seems like a bug. I ended up treating it as a one time fluke and just edited my save to put the reputation back to where it was before the crash. It would be nice to know what could have changed my reputation so radically to avoid it in the future.

[Xd the great]

The quick save is to use the ALT F12 menu to add repotation.

*starts imagining the 16 bit to 64 bit transfer code on the ariane v*