Should we fake succesful form submit, display result and then revert if some conditions are not met?

Question

Like on Stack exchange, when you try to vote up your question, it appears like you successfully voted, count goes up and vote up button highlights, but then when form actually completes submitting count and vote up highlight reverts and you get "You can't vote for your post"

• Is this good practice?
• Is this technique widely adopted among quality "user-friendly" sites?
• Isn't there a chance user disconnects and thinks action was successful?
• Can this technique apply to user posts, like ajax comments, or is that more risky?

Personally as user, I like it very much, because there are no delays and "loadings" to the action I wanted to do?

UPDATE:

After reading my own question few times over, made me think how would related data be handled, ie. User submit post that wasn't yet processed by server and tries to delete it, server error?

Answer 1

I just tried and I did not see what you were describing when I was not logged in to the site; I was immediately prompted to log in or register, with no animation on the button.

However, when logged in I agree with what you saw; that the button animated, then we got a little tooltip that said I couldn't vote for my own post.

I do not believe this is good design; I would have thought that they could have modified the up-vote / down-vote icons for your own posts (perhaps making them hollow triangles instead of filled ones); and the limit of interaction might be to give a popup or tooltip explaining that you can not vote for your own posts. I do like the icons being there, though, as it keeps the design consistent and it gives you something to interact with should you forget this is your post! If the site(s) simply hid the icons for your own post, where would you click to find out why?

Last point on a slightly unrelated note; the colour and flatness of the icons invites you to think they are disabled or are not interactive - only the mouse pointer change confirms interaction. Perhaps the up-vote / down-vote meme is common enough for the meaning to be clear to new users, but I am not convinced.