Identifying a "dis-accepted" answer

Question

When you click on the "envelope" next to your name on the top of the page, you get a summary of the recent changes. Clicking on the "Reputation" tab will tell you the up and down votes on your questions, your own downvotes, and any acceptance of your answers, as they reflect changes in your reputation.

Just now, I noticed that my rep had gone down by 15 points, presumably because an answer that had been previously marked as "accepted" was "dis-accepted." I would like to find out which one it was (and to see if a different answer was accepted instead). But it seems that this is not displayed in that page.

Am I correct that such changes would not be displayed? Presumably, the +15 tag with the acceptance has disappeared from whichever day/week/month summary it was on before, but I unless I happen to remember which answers had been accepted and compare it to the current status of my answers, it seems difficult to figure it out.

If there is a way in which this is displayed, what is it? If there is no way, is there any way that information about such "dis-acceptance" changes might also be displayed in the summary list?

Answer 1

There's a new discussion on meta.SO, started by Nick Craver (a developer): How do you want to be notified of unaccepted answers? It appears they're working on completing the feature-requests mentioned in Jonas' answer.

Update: This has been completed now; as of 2011-09-22, users can see their unaccepted answers in the reputation report.

Answer 2

Update Sep. 22 23, 2011: The answer below is outdated. See Hendrik Vogt's answer for the news. (I'm adding this because this answer is currently accepted and might be misleading without a disclaimer.)

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See these meta.stackoverflow.com posts:

Notification when my answer is unaccepted?

Reputation notification of deselected answer?

Please show us when we lose an accepted answer

They are all tagged "feature-request" and the earliest one is highly upvoted, but I don't see any feedback from the administrators. One of the accepted answers reads:

I think it makes sense that you don't get notification because the deselection is actually wiping out the vote record in the DB.

Answer 3

I just had this happen to me and I would have liked to be notified about it. Not out of a desire to be the one with the accepted answer, or to enter in to a shoot-out over reputation, but to maximise the chance that the OP gets an answer to their question.

My answer was the only answer to that question. I cited a theorem that was close to the result being asked for. The OP accepted it, but then (I'm guessing) de-accepted it due to some comments about how close was close enough. Fortunately, I saw those comments and realised that there was still a gap between the result that I'd cited and the result that the OP wanted. Even more fortunately, the gap was something that I'd proven in one of my own papers. So I was able to modify my answer to better answer the OP's question.

However, to even see this, I relied on comments to my answer. Being notified about the de-acceptance would be a much more reliable method of finding out that an answer I'd posted hadn't actually answered the OP's question given that it had seemed, at one point, that it had.

So I'm off now to meta.SO to vote for those feature requests.

(The question in question is: If $g^{-1} \circ f \circ g$ is $C^\infty$ whenever $f$ is $C^\infty$, must $g$ be $C^\infty$?)

Answer 4

Answered status and especially "which answer is, in the OP's opinion, most acceptance-worthy" are poster-dependent metadata. They are about the relationship between poster and answer, and external to the relationship between question and answer(s).

Given that distinction, I think it is against the impersonal Q&A style of the site (see earlier thread "SE is not a social networking site") to create additional connections between the OP metadata and other users, in this case notifying the authors of the old and new accepted answers, as though they have acquired a piece of the question entitling them to status updates. It creates bogus connotations of ownership, rejection and superiority (of answers), and there are already users who fight over which answer truly satisfies the OP's intention, rather than posting answers for whatever value those may have to the user population and/or the OP.

Accentuating the acceptance status of answers leads to comment wars over which answer is correct, when the acceptance itself is often nothing more than a personal opinion of a judge who is -- by definition! -- unqualified.