Accepted answer date and time not being updated when it was previously accepted?

Question

This is something I noticed:

As per my rep records, I just lost 15 rep as an unaccept:

When I went over to the answer, the timestamp on the now-accepted answer made no sense:

How is that an answer which was accepted 2 years ago, made me lose rep now?

Looking at the timeline, I think this is what has happened:

• Ganesh's answer was initially accepted.
• In December, my answer was marked as accepted.
• Today, my answer was marked as unaccepted.

So, does this mean that unaccepting my answer resulted in the previous marked as accepted answer being marked as the-current-accepted-answer, even though the timeline doesn't explicitly say it has been accepted?

Or is that the timestamp on the once-accepted-answer isn't updated?

Answer 1

This happens when a question is merged. For accepted answers THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE, so the earliest wins. You can see that a merge happened here: https://superuser.com/posts/59860/revisions

Kudos to balpha for finding that, I thought we had a phantom double accept cleanup job I was incapable of finding and was going slightly mad.