Favorite a question

Question

Is there a way to know who favorited ★ a question?

If yes, how?

If not, why does it have to be 'private information'?

Answer 1

Sure, it's possible. I wrote a simple query, which you can find on Data StackExchange here.

It takes in an input of Question ID, and returns a list of User ID and User names who favourited that particular question.

E.g. Question ID 8021 is Is there a (La)TeX distribution running on iPad?

Running the query on this gives 11 favourites:

It's easy to verify that these people actually did favourite that question by going to their profiles and checking their activity.

With regards to the privacy concerns, there has been a discussion on Meta before, Can there be an option to keep your list of favourites private?.

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Addendum

For those who do not know how to get the question ID, it'll be on the URL. For example:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8021/is-there-a-latex-distribution-running-on-ipad

And I decided to post the query here for posterity:

-- Find who favourited a particular question

DECLARE @QuestionID int = ##QuestionID##

SELECT
  v.CreationDate AS [Voted On],
  v.UserId AS [User ID],
  u.DisplayName AS [User Name]
FROM
  Votes v
  INNER JOIN
  Users u ON v.UserId = u.Id
WHERE v.VoteTypeId = 5 AND v.PostID = ##QuestionID##
ORDER BY v.CreationDate DESC;