Deleted users show up differently in a list in the timeline

Question

If a question is closed (or reopened) then the list of close (or reopen) voters is displayed in the timeline of that question, with each username on a new line. For instance:

The above image shows the following list:

Brahadeesh
user729424
Batominovski
Eric Wofsey
Matt Samuel

However, if one of the users has deleted their account, then their generic username is displayed on the same line as the next voter, with a comma separating the two entries. For instance:

The above image shows the following list:

Gone
user170039, Brahadeesh
Zacky
John Omielan

Here, user170039 is the deleted user.

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Can the timeline be modified so that the lists are always displayed consistently? I encountered the differences at Mathematics Meta SE, but I presume the timeline is displayed the same way everywhere.

Answer 1

This will be fixed in the next build.

We have one function which takes a list of user votes attached in a post history and converts that to a list of user links. This is used not just in post timelines but in things like showing the list of users who have closed or deleted a post.

This is the only case where we have the users listed one per line instead of separated by commas and this was implemented with a very old hack of just replacing , with <br/> via JavaScript. This hack had to be refined when we rolled out the dupe hammer, since it contained additional commas, so we started replacing </a>, with </a><br/> and </span>, with </span><br>. This again used JavaScript on page load.

Unfortunately, deleted users don't have links and are showed up in the list as user####, , which didn't match the expression and therefore were left with commas instead of line breaks.

My solution was to get rid of the hack and pass a parameter to the original link rendering function saying so it would render <br> instead of , in the timeline.