I closed a question (“ Transposing matrices by multiplication ”) some hours ago as a dupe, but someone gave it a new answer two hours later. Looking at the revision history, the question had not been reopened. How could that happen?
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2$\begingroup$ meta.stackexchange.com/a/91928/1218938 $\endgroup$– user1082389Commented Jul 3, 2022 at 15:23
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$\begingroup$ @BeKind That settles it. Thanks. $\endgroup$– user1551Commented Jul 3, 2022 at 15:24
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$\begingroup$ Some related posts on this site: Grace period when a question is closed, I answered a question that was on hold and Bug: answer posted after closing the question.. $\endgroup$– Martin SleziakCommented Jul 3, 2022 at 20:47
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This is a cross-site duplicate of How was this answer posted after this question was closed? on global meta. This is a community wiki answer recording the accepted answer there.
If a question is closed while you're answering on the full version of the site, you will receive a notification that the question was closed and the 'Post Your Answer' button will be disabled. However, this is only a client-side restriction, so it is possible in some cases that this process fails.
When it does, the backend allows for a grace period of around four hours (previously there was no time limit). Presumably the client-side restriction did fail in this case, and since the answer was "in-flight", as Jeff describes it, the server accepted it despite the question already having been closed.
For users answering from a mobile device, there's no client-side restriction in place to begin with, so this situation is presumably even easier to create when using the mobile version of the site.
As a side note, this apparently even works for questions closed due to migration. (Editor's note: This was fixed sometime in 2012.)