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Question: lot of .exe folders are created on my windows7

Answer: try that...

The question was closed at 11:57:57 (according to the hover-over-"x-mins-ago" bar) and the answer was posted at 12:16:35. It's a fairly lengthy answer, so it's possible that it was started to be written before it was closed but I swear I've started to answer a question then I got a banner along the top saying "this question has been closed" and the answer was no longer post-able.

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    Also keep in mind that the website is actually several servers acting as front-end which have individual clocks that can be off by seconds due to lack of strict time-keeping. You can post something with a given timestamp that actually represents a time in the future or the past by several seconds. This is why you can find answers posted to questions where the answer timestamp occurs before the question timestamp.
    – Pollyanna
    Commented Sep 25, 2013 at 14:57
  • possible duplicate of Why was an answer allowed on a question that was merged into another one?
    – gnat
    Commented May 14, 2014 at 13:05
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    @AdamDavis In most cases, that's due to post merges. There's no way that the clocks are far enough out for a user to see the question, read it, write an answer, post it, and have its timestamp be before the question was asked.
    – wizzwizz4
    Commented Jul 4, 2018 at 15:26

2 Answers 2

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If a question is closed while you're answering on the full version of the site, you will receive a notification that the question was closed and the 'Post Your Answer' button will be disabled. However, this is only a client-side restriction, so it is possible in some cases that this process fails.

When it does, the backend allows for a grace period of around four hours (previously there was no time limit). Presumably the client-side restriction did fail in this case, and since the answer was "in-flight", as Jeff describes it, the server accepted it despite the question already having been closed.

For users answering from a mobile device, there's no client-side restriction in place to begin with, so this situation is presumably even easier to create when using the mobile version of the site.

As a side note, this apparently even works for questions closed due to migration. (Editor's note: This was fixed sometime in 2012.)

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  • For an example, see here: meta.stackexchange.com/q/91932/2598 (It just happened to me)
    – jjnguy
    Commented May 19, 2011 at 15:13
  • Your answer is a little outdated, as per meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/a/3374/5323. Do you have access to more recent information?
    – MTL
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 21:59
  • @Shokhet Four hours is still correct, is there another aspect you were concerned about?
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 22:15
  • No; I was asking about the four hours. ....I have no idea.
    – MTL
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 22:17
  • @Shokhet Ah, well I verified it was four hours prior to responding, so I'm fairly confident that's still the case! :)
    – Tim Stone
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 22:18
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When a question is closed, the server still accepts answers for 4 hours. So if you can submit an answer to the question within this 4 hours, your answer gets legitimately accepted by the server.

If you want to force-submit an answer after a question is closed (within 4h), you can do this:

Open another question on the same site and compose your answer. Right-click the answer form and select Inspect (or hit F12) to open the Developer Console of your browser (this may vary): Locate the question ID above the answer form in "Elements" and change the numbers to the ID of the question that you want to submit the answer to. There are two of such numbers. Then you can hit Post Your Answer to submit your answer.

You will also be redirected to the target question after the automatic refresh after submitting your answer.

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    if you've already started writing an answer before it's closed, you can force an answer by removing disabled="disabled" from the form submit button.
    – Zoe - Save the data dump
    Commented Sep 21, 2019 at 9:47

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