If the answer has 12 score, why is the question "unanswered"?

Question

I was browsing the tab for unanswered questions and I saw the question Spam. Lots and lots of spam:

But why is it considered unanswered? Note that:

• It has one answer with a score of 12 (+13/-1). Not accepted, but certainly positively scored.
• The answer is currently not deleted.
• All of the voting on the answer happened a long time ago, in 2015.
• It was never merged. (Similar bug reports involving merges were reported here and here and here.)
• Searching for the question title in the close as duplicate search doesn’t bring it up either. (Due to how Meta works, you can use it as a dupe target if you paste it in.)

You can reproduce this with the unanswered tab under questions (aka with "No accepted answer" in a filter). The post is easily found at the bottom of the last page.

And in addition to that, the post can (also easily) be found when searching with the isanswered:no operator, at the bottom of the page. The operator should return "questions with no positively-scored answers" (so it's expected that questions with accepted 0 score answers show up—but not this specific question).

Answer 1

This recently happened also on Matter Modeling Stack Exchange (MMSE), for this question. The question had been deleted, and when it got un-deleted, the question re-entered the unanswered queue, despite having an answer with a score of +5. The asker had not downvoted the answer, as Gnemlock suggested in their answer. The second hypothesis by Gnemlock, also holds true in the MMSE case because the user that wrote the answer had their account deleted.

Hyper-neutrino upvoted the answer to see if the problem was simply that the answer had got no upvotes since being deleted. This didn't seem to change anything. Furthermore, the example given in your question involved an answer that had received 0 upvotes since being deleted and undeleted. I upvoted the answer just now (it was a good answer anyway), and despite that being about 20 minutes ago, the question you originally mentioned, is still in the unanswered queue:

We did however manage to fix this on the MMSE question by deleting the answer by the deleted user, and re-posting it as a Community Wiki and upvoting the "new" answer. This is not a great solution, because the original answer's upvotes are all gone, and the author of them (even though that author's SE account was removed) is not apparent to people that don't have enough rep to see deleted answers.

It does seem that there is a bug when:

• A question with a positive-score answer by a user with a removed account, is deleted then undeleted. The positive-score answer no longer counts, and the answer re-enters the unanswered queue. New upvotes to that answer don't help the question exit the unanswered queue, only new answers seem work for this purpose.

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_{Credit to Sonic for pointing this question to my attention, to rene for pointing out that the question on MMSE had been deleted then undeleted, to Hyper-neutrino for their help with testing one of the theories about what might be going on, and to everyone else that helped get to the bottom of this.}

Answer 2

I can see two potential ways this question may be marked as "unanswered".

The asker downvoted it

We can not assume an answer does not resolve the question, if left un-accepted; however, we can assume that the answer does not resolve the question, if the asker then downvoted it. We can see that the answer has received one downvote, and the asker admits that it from them.

Hu, weird. Perhaps because I downvoted the answer? – Tim 3 hours ago

The account that posted the answer has been removed

We can see that the user account from which the answer was posted has been deactivated. It is entirely possible that answers from deleted accounts do not appear in the search for "questions with no upvoted answers", from which we derive the "Unanswered Questions" .

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If it comes down to being downvoted by the original user, I would accept that this question qualifies as "unanswered". The downvote, itself, confirms that the answer is not useful to the asker. This would suggest that an alternate answer may be necessary.

If it comes down to the answering user deleting their account, this may likely be a bug that needs further investigation.