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This question had a strange history:
Closed at 02:21:43Z UTC
Answer posted at 03:32:54Z UTC
How is this possible?
I don't see an answer there.
I'm with VP on this one: something's not adding up here.
As I write this, the question was closed four hours ago, and an answer was given and then deleted three hours ago. Que pasa?
Yeah, I'm mystified too.
Oh my .... word! Kevin, that is almost certainly what happened. If anyone has any doubts, I've just managed to post an answer here.
@Andrew: wow. But the question you posted an answer to has been closed for almost a year now. So how did you manage to pull off what Kevin suggested?
I don't suppose you'd believe that I've had that question open in a window all this time? No?
Seriously, I'm not sure that I should tell! I wonder if this is the case on other SE sites, or if it got fixed in the newer ones? The only SE site on which I have a login is the TeX one and I'm a moderator there so that probably messes up the test. I could try it on StackOverflow itself, but I'm a little hesitant about doing that ... I found this post on meta.stackoverflow which says that what originally happened is Status-By-Design, though the delay of an hour is perhaps a bit long (maybe the answerer took a lunch break?). This post seems to say that there is a block after a short time, but it doesn't go in to any details as to how the block is implemented. This question implies that there is no upper limit.
Okay, I'm probably going to get slammed for this but I just managed to do the same on meta.stackoverflow. I deleted the answer straight away so that the more tech-savvy crowd there wouldn't spot it.
Bug report for anyone who's interested.
Will, I don't think that Scott and Anton have the power to do anything about this as a solution would need to be implemented in the main core program. Indeed, the problem is that the locks on closed questions are all at the client side and not at the server side so once you figure out how to bypass the locks on your computer, there's no problem.
However, I think that this is unlikely to be a major source of spam. It's a bit obvious when it's been done, and the mods can always delete the added answers (indeed, I would argue that - with the exception of my proof-of-concept answer - any answer added like this should be deleted-as-spam (so long as it's clearly done like this and not like the original post that brought this up, so anything added a day after the question was closed, for example)), so apart from a bit of noise and annoyance then I can't really see anyone "exploiting" this. So so long as the mods are aware of it, I would say that that's enough. And I'd be surprised if they haven't been reading this thread.
Um, how to do it actually seems pretty obvious from the information posted: Closing a question blocks you from getting the “answer this question” form, but there is no enforcement against posting an answer on the server side. So you just have to create the necessary form yourself, then fill it in and submit it, or you generate the necessary POST request directly and submit that. No magic required if you know a bit about how these things work.
Harald, I think you'd be surprised how many people still wouldn't be able to figure it out!
Anyway, ironically finding that bug has pushed me over the 10k rep. I decided not to make that answer community wiki so that Joe Bloggs couldn't edit it and it would simply fade back in to obscurity, but it's gained me a little more rep - some of which has come from that question being bumped back to the front page. I don't feel too bad, though.
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