Is there a way to know who favorited ★ a question?
If yes, how?
If not, why does it have to be 'private information'?
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2If you can narrow down the pool of users to a couple of "suspects", you can check their profile pages with the list of favourites. For example you can see my "favourites" here tex.stackexchange.com/users/36296/samcarter?tab=favorites (the quotation marks because I use it as some kind of bookmark to be able to find some questions again) – user36296 Dec 28 '18 at 20:41
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@samcarter Well that would be the hard way. What if there are "100 suspects" or what if you have absolutely no idea who could be. – user178403 Dec 28 '18 at 20:49
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That's why my comment started with "if" :) – user36296 Dec 28 '18 at 20:56
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@samcarter Ah. ok :) – user178403 Dec 28 '18 at 21:01
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5off-topic: please don't interpret too much in any counts of favourites. Users use this button for all kinds of purposes (to compensate other missing functionalities in the UI of this site), knowing who favourites a question would not be really useful, unless you ask the user why he/she/it favoured the post – user36296 Dec 28 '18 at 21:01
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@samcarter Yes, you are totally right, I was just being curious. – user178403 Dec 28 '18 at 21:06
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@samcarter is right when she said users use the "favorite" button for any kind of purpose: in my case, other than my favorite posts, I use it also to flag the question I think I could ask, to answer when I have time, if nobody else already did it meanwhile. However, the question is very interesting, +1! – CarLaTeX Dec 29 '18 at 6:22
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@CarLaTeX it is, isn't? :D – user178403 Dec 29 '18 at 18:17
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Absolutely! :):):) – CarLaTeX Dec 29 '18 at 18:22
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?.
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;
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1Great! I run it on some of my questions and I surprisingly found out that users who flagged them, in general, aren't "habitué" of the site! – CarLaTeX Dec 29 '18 at 6:34
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Your request does not work in all cases. There are users who are not displayed. For example, this question has two favorites, your query only displays one. tex.stackexchange.com/q/468363/138900 – AndréC Jan 12 '19 at 5:27
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Perhaps. This question has 2 favorites, only one is displayed : tex.stackexchange.com/q/468363/138900 – AndréC Jan 12 '19 at 13:54
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Does this still works? I am trying to use it but does not return anything. – user178403 Feb 8 '19 at 0:52
