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Why does this query only return 124 rows when https://stackoverflow.com/users/470749/ryan?tab=votes&sort=all says "4,912 Votes Cast"?

SELECT v.id, v.VoteTypeId, v.CreationDate
FROM Votes v
WHERE v.UserId = 470749
ORDER BY v.CreationDate DESC

I must be misunderstanding something.

I know that it's not an issue of stale data because those thousands of votes happened over multiple years, and https://data.stackexchange.com/help now says "How often is the Stack Exchange Data Explorer updated? The data is updated early every Sunday morning around 3:00 UTC."

1 Answer 1

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You have, on Stack Overflow, favorited 121 questions (votetypeid = 5) and offered three bounties (votetypeid = 8) and that are the only two votetypes that have a populated userid field.

The votes table is sanitized. This means that the userid is removed for most votetypeid's.

If this wasn't the case others could find out who voted for posts, which breaks the promise that voting is anonymous.

Your only option is scraping your own profile as none of the data options, Stack API or SEDE, offer your profile voting data.

See also Database schema documentation for the public data dump and SEDE.

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    Good to know. And it makes sense to keep votes private. But since I'm allowed to see my own votes, is there a way for me to export them somewhere? I don't want to page through hundreds of pages of history trying to find a post that I remember voting on.
    – Ryan
    Sep 2, 2018 at 16:13
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    @Ryan your only option is scraping your own profile.
    – rene
    Sep 2, 2018 at 16:15
  • Ok, thanks for your help.
    – Ryan
    Sep 2, 2018 at 16:19

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