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I am considering revising an Answer I posted to a query about time resolution and bandwidth. My Answer received a fair number of positive votes -- in fact more than the accepted Answer and so I suppose that the person who posed the question didn't like my Answer. I doubt very much that he will change his mind after reading what I want to say in my revision, but that does not concern me in the least. But I am wondering about the policy of this site especially vis a vis those whose upvotes will possibly be rendered invalid after the revision if they ever get around to reading the revised version and change their minds! Are post-voting changes permitted by the moderators?

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Upvotes (and downvotes) are "locked in" 5 minutes after a user casts their vote. After that, they will not be able to revoke it until the post is edited. The ability to revoke votes after editing, is in place so that downvotes placed on a poor quality question/answer can be removed if the user puts in an effort to improve it (or in some cases, revoking upvotes if they disagree with the edit).

So typically, if a user edits their post to improve it, add additional material or make typos and other corrections, no one revokes their upvotes and they're not lost either. In fact, editing to improve is always encouraged. If people happen to disagree with the user's edit, they now have the opportunity to revoke their upvote.

However, it is against the spirit of the site to edit highly upvoted answers and entirely change the content and meaning (other than for reasons in my previous point), possibly defacing it, and is not permitted. One can certainly expect downvotes to flow in if this is the case, with a high probability of a suspension.

I hope that has answered your question.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yes, it has answered my question, and I have decided that I won't bother with revising my answer because it would be a major edit, and while it would bring in additional ideas and materials and improve the answer tremendously, the world has moved on and can manage quite well if it devotes no more thought to this topic. $\endgroup$
    – Dilip Sarwate
    Commented Oct 20, 2011 at 20:46
  • $\begingroup$ If you feel your ideas will definitely improve the answer and lay to rest some misconceptions on the topic, I would definitely encourage you to go ahead and edit it, irrespective of whether or not the OP accepts your answer with the check mark. It does happen at times, that more than one answer is correct and the OP happened to like the language in one better than the other, or didn't pay equal attention to all answers... The point is that upvotes convey what the Community liked and "Accepted answer" conveys what the OP liked. I hope you can see that they're two different concepts. $\endgroup$
    – Lorem Ipsum Mod
    Commented Oct 20, 2011 at 20:54
  • $\begingroup$ @DilipSarwate The OP here is me! Forgive me but I had no idea/notification that you had edited your answer and given more detail Dilip. (Perhaps we should add some sort of notification system for that). Anyway, I will take a new look one more time! $\endgroup$
    – Spacey
    Commented Nov 22, 2011 at 21:18
  • $\begingroup$ @Mohammad Thanks for taking the time to read my revised answer. I hope you won't be wasting your time because I don't think my revision was too successful because the revision promptly received a down vote. Maybe you won't like the revised version either..... $\endgroup$
    – Dilip Sarwate
    Commented Nov 23, 2011 at 3:15

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