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I'd just like to know the logic behind making it appear as though the authorship of a question has been attributed to the most recent editor (as opposed to the original author themselves).

Example (from drupal.stackexchange.com):

This was the homepage view at around 3:45pm (PDT) today. Note the author of the first question appears to be "kiamlaluno", and the author of the third question appears to be "sand": Homepage view

However when you click on the first question (for which one answer has been submitted) you can see that the user listed on the homepage is neither the actual author nor the user who submitted the answer, but rather the user who edited the question last: Edited and answered question

Just to make sure I understood what was originally displayed after posting a question, with no edits, answers, etc., I checked another question (the third question) and found that if a question hasn't been touched by anyone else then the original author is the one whose name appears in the list (homepage) view which, to me, makes that the default display: Untouched question

Whether or not this has positive, negative, or neutral connotations I have no idea, but I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility of a situation where User A, who normally answers a lot of questions except for those asked by User Q because [insert reason here], would miss out on the opportunity to answer questions asked by a different user but since they all appear to be asked by User Q, they receive little or no attention from User A.

Sorry this question was so long... But again, my question is ultimately: "What's the logic behind this?"

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    This is status by design. The user name on the list of question in front page is the last user that do something in the question (edit, post an answer, etc.)
    – nhahtdh
    Commented May 12, 2013 at 23:31

2 Answers 2

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The logic basically amounts to "we show the last activity on the question list and who it is attributed to". It would possibly be even more confusing to show the original timestamp of when the question was asked and the author even if the question was recently edited, answered, bumped, etc.

It can certainly look confusing, though, so we're currently looking at whether or not we can implement this request: Can we add 'asked', 'answered', 'edited' text to each question featured on the front page?. No promises just yet on whether or not it's going to happen, but if we can, we're going to make the front page more clear about what the latest activity on the question was.

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  • Excellent response. Thanks so much. :)
    – jerdiggity
    Commented May 13, 2013 at 1:01
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This is by-design. The name and the timestamp on the the front question list shows the last user that performs some action (editing, answering, but commenting is not included) and the according timestamp. The Community user may also occasionally bump some old questions into the list, which is also shown accordingly.

You can click on the timestamp to get to the post (question or answer) where last activity occurs in the question.

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