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The timeline for one of my answers, https://math.stackexchange.com/posts/4735814/timeline, shows that my answer was accepted three times. I don't think that's possible. My answer has been unaccepted, as I can see on my reputation tab, but no unacceptance shows up on the timeline.

I'm not complaining about the unaccept – there were good and sufficient reasons for it – just asking whether it isn't usually the case that when there is an unaccept, it shows up on the timeline. For the time being, at least, I'm calling this a bug.

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The timeline details are correct, with it being that you're misreading them. For testing purposes, and to confirm my interpretation, I just unaccepted and then reaccepted my answer, with the timeline originally just showing one entry of the acceptance, but with it now showing an earlier set of $2$ entries. In particular, consider your answer's timeline shown below:

OP's answer timeline

Each group of $2$ "accept" entries have $2$ date/time values, and are shown with a pink background, I suspect to indicate that they have cancelled each other and, thus, are no longer applicable. I believe that having the second entry with an action of something like "unaccept" would make this more clear, and likely also less confusing.

Since it's shown in reverse time order, starting from the last set of values, note your first one shows the OP accepted on July $15$, $2023$ at $0$:$11$:$01$Z (the $01$ seconds part is seen by clicking "toggle format" or from the tooltip), then the one just below it shows the OP unaccepted your answer just about $5$ seconds later at $0$:$11$:$06$Z. The next set of values up shows the OP accepted your answer again about $3$ seconds later at $0$:$11$:$09$Z, but then unaccepted again about $3$ minutes after that at $0$:$14$:$09$Z. Finally, the top set of pink entries shows the OP accepted your answer once again just about $1$ second later, i.e., at $0$:$14$:$10$Z. Note the total time period between the initial acceptance and the last acceptance described here was only just about $3$ minutes and $9$ seconds. Thus, unless you were online then, it's quite possible you didn't notice the multiple times your answer was accepted and unaccepted. Also, your reputation listing would likely condense these into one entry of $15$ points for the acceptance whenever you checked it afterwards.

Note that your answer remained accepted until April $2$, $2024$ at $23$:$54$:$24$Z, i.e., about $14$ hours ago. In your question's timeline, the current top entry (note it has no pink background, and is shown by itself, which means it's currently valid) indicates the OP has accepted another answer at $23$:$54$:$24$Z, i.e., almost immediately after unaccepting your answer.

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    $\begingroup$ OK, so, when there are two times but only one word, "accept", it really means "accept" followed by "unaccept". Yes, the software could have been written to make this clear and not so confusing to me. Can I still call it a bug, if it's doing what it was designed to do, but what it's designed to do isn't (in my opinion) what it should have been designed to do? $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 3 at 11:48
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    $\begingroup$ @GerryMyerson IMO that's technically not a bug, since AFAIK that was the way the system was designed, so it's behaving "correctly". Nonetheless, I also consider this to be a poor user interface layout since I, too, was somewhat confused the first time I saw it. I certainly think it's worthwhile to bring it to the attention of the company, just in case they reconsider this and make some appropriate changes (hopefully to make it better overall). $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 3 at 14:17

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