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I came across this oddity when I ran this search query, sorted by votes:

Uh oh, SpaghettiOs

That question has zero answers, but its search result summary is formatted as though it has an accepted answer (green box, yellow-highlighted text). In fact, the CSS class on that div is class="status answered-accepted">.

Perhaps the Skynet Exchange Stack Exchange system has become so intelligent, that it knows the OP solved their own problem (answering it in the question portion of the post), and thus it's marked as "answered-accepted."

Or maybe, after over 5 years, the question has just accepted the fact that it isn't going to get any answers.

Regardless, this seems like a display bug =)

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    I can see a deleted accepted answer under that question (link, 10K+). I thought that was not possible. I do not see who deleted that answer, though. – Frédéric Hamidi Feb 25 '14 at 16:11
  • Heh, I was thinking that was the actual reason @FrédéricHamidi =) Since the post is from '08, maybe you could delete accepted answers back then. – Josh Darnell Feb 25 '14 at 16:13
  • What a fantastic answer that reads: Thanks for sharing, Andreas! – devnull Feb 25 '14 at 16:18
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The accepted answer was deleted.

This is actually a pretty common occurrence for some older posts. Basically what happened was a script ran some time in 2011 (Feb?) which systematically removed a certain swath of answers. A very small percent of those were accepted answers and the result was that sometimes it looks as if there is a 0 answer with an accepted answer. If you had 10k you would see the deleted answer.

I wrote a question about this here: How did an accepted answer get deleted? (animuson removed the checkmark), which was a duplicate of this: Deleted accepted answer pinned as top answer

The quick solution to this would be to undelete the answer, and then re-delete it. At the time the script ran apparently deleting an accepted answer did not remove the checkmark. However, that loophole has since been fixed.

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  • Ah, I suppose that this, too, is a duplicate then. – Josh Darnell Feb 25 '14 at 16:18
  • @jadarnel27 - I suppose, but I didn't want to leave all of this in a series of comments. – Travis J Feb 25 '14 at 16:19
  • Hmmm, after reading your answer and seeing the link that @devnull provided, I wonder if a dev or mod could write a script to clean up the answers that are still undeleted and marked as accepted. – Anil Natha Feb 25 '14 at 17:45
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    @SlyRaskal - I think that a dev probably could write a script rather easily to handle that. Since this no longer happens anymore, and the checkmarks aren't really valid, they shouldn't exist. So it would potentially be as easy as selecting all deleted answers with the checkmark and then simply changing the checkmark flag. – Travis J Feb 25 '14 at 18:31
  • I agree, it should be that simple and remove the possibility of concerns like ever being raised again in the future. – Anil Natha Feb 25 '14 at 18:32
  • Is that really a good way for them to spend their time though? I am not certain. That would probably figure in pretty low on priorities. – Travis J Feb 25 '14 at 18:34
  • Definitely not something I would expect them to do right away, just something to add to their to-do list when they have a few minutes to tackle a low priority item. Just because it's low priority doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to be fixed at some point. – Anil Natha Feb 25 '14 at 18:44

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