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Pierre-Yves Gaillard and I have just answered the same question a few moments ago. We have no up- or downvotes but there are two comments to Pierre-Yves's answers. My answer was, quite naturally, behind his since I answered later.
However when I went back to my answer, wondering if I should edit some details, I noticed that now my answer was before his. As I was intrigued, I went back a few times to check and indeed our answers seemed to be permuted rather frequently.
This is strange because neither of us edited his text, there were no new comments and, as already mentioned, nobody voted on our answers.
Needless to say, I don't care in what order our posts appear , but I'm frustrated not to have a clue on what's going on. Have I missed something obvious?

Update OK, now Pierre-Yves has an up-vote and I none, so his answer quite logically precedes mine. But I'm still interested in what was going on a few minutes ago!

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  • $\begingroup$ You can change the order of the answers, no? $\endgroup$
    – Mariano Suárez-Álvarez
    Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 22:51
  • $\begingroup$ @Mariano: really? How? Anyway, I hadn't changed anything when I asked the question. As explained by Aryabhata below, the software did it. $\endgroup$
    – Georges Elencwajg
    Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 23:16

1 Answer 1

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To give each answer similar 'view' time, the answers of same rank are sorted randomly, depending on the view you have chosen.

More info here: Is the order in which answers of the same rank get listed well defined?

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks a lot for this perfect answer, Aryabhata, especially since I was starting to believe I was imagining things! And, by the way, I find this a nice feature of the software. $\endgroup$
    – Georges Elencwajg
    Commented Oct 24, 2011 at 23:13

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