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When you visit a question that you have asked or an answer you have given you can see on the left hand side of the screen buttons for up-voting and down-voting as well as the number of people of votes for the question.

When one clicks up-vote, a message appears telling you that you can't vote on your own question. I'm just wondering why the up-vote and down-vote buttons are even visible if they cannot be used.

When you hover over your own comments it doesn't give you voting buttons...so why should it do so on questions and answers that you own?

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    It keeps the design uniform.
    – Ian Elliott
    Commented Aug 20, 2009 at 7:24
  • doh! I searched for duplicates before I posted it....
    – mezoid
    Commented Aug 20, 2009 at 8:33
  • You can post and select your own answer as the correct one for a rep boost. I think that should be fixed...
    – doomspork
    Commented Aug 20, 2009 at 14:17
  • @doomspork marking our own asnwer as correct will gain NO reputation
    – jaimin
    Commented Aug 22, 2014 at 11:23

2 Answers 2

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For me personally I find it confusing as well.

However having said that I do know that there is a school of thought in the software design and UI space that says something to the effect that:

"you should never hide functionallity from a user, regardless of whether they have access to it or not. Instead it is more meaningful to provide the button and display a helpful error message when it is clicked. That way they know it is there and understand the context of the buttons usage better."

I'm not sure which way I feel is better, but I do know that I prefer to see a consistant approach either way. Which as the mezoid pointed out, does not seem to be the case on stack exchange.

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This is probably "by-design", as in this case (adding comments on locked questions / answers). Seems like if they remove certain parts of the site, it "breaks".

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