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Sometimes an OP changes their mind and awards the accepted answer mark to another post. Sometimes they don't know you can only mark one answer as accepted, and click the big checkmark next to each answer on their question without realising this un-accepts the each previous answer at the same time. The old timeline view would show you that this happened, by including accept un-accept events as separate entries.

The new timeline, spiffy as it is, doesn't include unaccepts and only shows the most recent accept vote. I'm really missing this information, it was one of the very few reasons I used the old timeline in the first place.

This is especially important for moderators, where we sometimes have to diagnose fraud where an accepted answer was plagiarised and the accept mark shifted over to the new copy. Having to hunt through the victim reputation history to try and piece together a timeline of events is so much harder now.

Can the new view please show all accepts and include un-accepts again?

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    Yes, please! I just ran into this on Stack Overflow. I hadn't realized that there was a regression in the timeline view related to showing accept/unaccept events. Not only is the history not shown, but the accepted answer isn't visible in the timeline at all when the Q&A is deleted. There is no reason for that information to be hidden.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Commented Nov 22, 2020 at 5:55
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    This seems like a bug/missed usecase and not a feature request so I've retagged this as a bug and set it to status-deferred. We'll update this post when it's been investigated and/or resolved.
    – Des StaffMod
    Commented Feb 19, 2021 at 21:56

2 Answers 2

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This has been fixed. Question timelines weren't looking for accept votes on their answers, just votes on the question itself. The timeline now shows all past and present accept votes on their answers. (If anyone has a time machine, we could show future accepts there too.)

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    My time machine already shows this answer as accepted.
    – Elements In Space
    Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 20:45
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    Thanks for coming back to fix this! We notice ;-). (specifically, I just saw the new behaviour here and came to post an update, but you're already ahead of the curve and you've also communicated it =).)
    – E.P.
    Commented Nov 7, 2022 at 1:01
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    @ElementsinSpace: WOW, that's an amazing gadget! Indeed, this answer is now accepted! mind blown. (Thanks Kyle, this is really helpful!)
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Nov 25, 2022 at 14:40
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    It seems like this is only half fixed: accepts are now shown, but un-accepts are still not shown. Or is this deliberate for some reason?
    – Elements In Space
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 16:56
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    @ElementsinSpace I believe the timestamp of an unaccept vote is shown in the same entry as the accept vote, as in here.
    – The Amplitwist
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 17:18
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    @TheAmplitwist Okay, I do see the two time stamps. The latter must be the un-accept. I guess that's alright, but it wasn't particularly clear.
    – Elements In Space
    Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 17:37
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Yes: please change this. The lack of this information gets really annoying when there are nontrivial changes in the accepted answer.

If you want an example of a question with such changes, this one is a good one. In that specific case, the OP originally accepted my answer, and then some three years later changed the accepted answer to some other one, giving me a handy populist badge in the process.

However, it seems that about a week later the OP came back and unaccepted that answer, without accepting a new one. The corresponding accept/unaccept events on the OP's reputation timeline allow you to identify the answer in question as this one, but neither the question timeline nor the timelines on my answer or the other one will inform you that any of this happened.

The point of the timeline is to let you show you the blow-by-blow history of the post, so you can piece back together stories like this one. If it gets anywhere near nontrivial, the current view is patently failing.

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