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Chain of events will make the title clear:

  • I was reading an answer on Ask Different and upvoted it.

  • The upvote was shown but a banner came "An error has occurred - please retry your request." I noticed that my Wi-Fi was disconnected.

  • The upvote arrow is now unresponsive, not letting me remove the vote, nor downvote. Clicking on the vote count also shows another banner with "An error occurred during vote count fetch."

  • I reconnected Wi-Fi and reloaded the page; the vote count is back to +2.

So shouldn't the vote count be reset to +2 when the "error occurs," instead of erroneously showing +3 in a disconnected state?

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

So, apparently the communication between the client (your browser) and the server (Stack Exchange's backend system) failed. Broadly speaking, that can mean two things:

  • The client did not successfully send a complete request to the server.
  • The client successfully sent the request to the server, but the server could not send a complete response back.

In the first case, the vote is not registered; in the second case, it is. Now the tricky thing is that the client does not know which of the two things happened, and therefore cannot properly determine the state of the vote button. Stack Exchange just chose to leave it 'on' for whatever reason (maybe it's less work this way).

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1
  • When I intentionally turned off Wi-Fi to test this, case 1 happens. But 2 also is possible in some edge cases. I saw this(*) in the sidebar, and it seems easy client end fixes can be done quickly. * meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44137/…
    – anki
    Sep 26, 2019 at 7:15

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