I have searched the site but I can't find the answer to this. Jordan maybe it is a good idea if this is the policy to list that with the community points explanation text?
What happened was that I removed 3 of my items, for privacy reasons, from the Gallery and saw announced that for each item 3 community points were deducted.
I can see why you think that is fair, if you upload you get 3 so if you remove them you deduct 3.
I was just a little surprised because I never saw this mentioned anywhere.
Not only did I see my points being deducted but I saw a whole list of members who had points deducted. Loriém for instance had 1 point deducted. 
I don't think it's right to see what other members are doing getting points deleted, I'm okay with seeing mine of course.
Could you list what causes the deduction of the the community points? If I edit a forum message do I get points deleted? What would cause for instance the deduction of 1 point?
Hi Christine, thanks for bringing this up. I can see where it might seem a bit confusing to see points deducted when you delete a layout, especially points for other users.
What's happening is that you are simply losing the points you got for posting the layout (like you said: you get 3 for posting it, lose 3 for deleting it). This isn't designed to be some kind of "punishment": it's simply necessary that points be removed when content is removed in order to prevent the system from potentially being abused (someone could post a bunch of bogus layouts, and then delete them all to get a bunch of community points, if the points were not removed with the layouts).
As far as the points you saw being removed from other users, those are the points that those users got from commenting on your layout. When you delete a layout, you are also deleting all the comments various users have left on it, because those comments are attached directly to your layout. I would prefer to just let those users keep the points they got from commenting on your layout, but unfortunately we have to have the same policy for comments that we do for layouts, to prevent the same kind of potential abuse: people could post lots of bogus layout or forum comments, for instance, and delete them all to get lots of community points if their points were not removed when the comments are deleted.
Does that make sense?
I've added a note about this on the community points help page. Let me know if you have any further questions.
Hi Jordan, thanks for the explanation. It's totally clear now. I feel really guilty that others lost their points because I removed these layouts.:-(
I'm really sorry guys if you lost points because of this. These layouts contained too much information about my illness and it seemed improper to have them up in the gallery between all kinds of happy go lucky lay-outs. It just didn't seem fitting and I shouldn't have posted them in the first place.
Again my apologies.