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I came across this question on SharePoint StackExchange and noticed that the accepted answer was ranked second:

Accepted answer not first

Refreshing the page will swap it between first and second position randomly as if it just had the same votes as another answer and wasn't marked as accepted.

I've never seen an accepted answer in anything other than first position. The only strange thing I can see about this answer is that it appears to be answered and accepted by the same person that asked the question and that that person's account no longer exists.

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    I'd imagine the accepted answer was answered my the question poster. Self accepted answers don't get pinned to the top.
    – Steven V
    Commented Aug 1, 2014 at 2:25
  • "your own answer: There is no reputation awarded and the answer does not float to the top of the list. This can be done no earlier than 48 hours after the question is asked." - from How does accepting an answer work?
    – user213963
    Commented Aug 1, 2014 at 2:29

1 Answer 1

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If you accept your own answer to your question, it does not get automatically bumped to the top of the answers list and is instead sorted like any other answer.

In this case, both the owners of the answer and the question are deleted, so both of the user IDs for those posts are empty. Logically to the system nothing is equal to nothing, so it's treating the answer as being owned by the asker and not sorting it to the top.

Judging from the context of the answer, I would guess that the asker probably did post that answer anyways.

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  • Interesting. So accepting your own solution to your problem somehow invalidates that as having accepted answer status (i.e. top position)? I thought coming back and providing your own solution to your problem was desired behaviour?
    – Chris Latta
    Commented Aug 1, 2014 at 2:35
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    It is desired behavior, @Chris, and it's still the accepted answer. Personally, I'd rather the "accepted" status said nothing about the answer's position in the list of answers, ever.
    – Michael Petrotta
    Commented Aug 1, 2014 at 4:29
  • I guess the reason for "nameless deleted" users is that those posts were imported from the older Sharepoint site. Otherwise the Display Name string could not be blank.
    – user259867
    Commented Aug 1, 2014 at 5:26
  • @MichaelPetrotta One of the things that makes the Stack Exchange model work is that the correct answer is right after the question. Burying the right answer somewhere among the wrong answers is no better than the broken forum Q&A model that Stack Exchange was created to fix.
    – Chris Latta
    Commented Aug 1, 2014 at 7:15

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