I answered this question:    but I did not get the bounty for it.  Now Is there a way to understand why?  Following those 3 point for an eligible answer:    The answer must have been given after the bounty was started The answer must have a score of at least +2  The answer must not have been written by the bounty starter   I tried to find out if there was a point I didn't satisfy, but where can I find the statistics on where and when the bounty started or ended on that specific question?   EDIT:  I created a change request for this:
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It's possible to offer and award bounties of reputation on questions.   What is a bounty? How can I find questions that have a bounty attached? How do I start a bounty? When can I start a bounty? Why is the system requiring me to choose a bounty amount that's higher than the minimum? Can I use Markdown formatting in the bounty remarks? Can I edit the remark? How long is the bounty period? How do I award a bounty? Can I award a bounty to my own answer? Can I award a bounty to an old answer? If I offer a bounty on someone else's question, can I award the bounty to their answer? After awarding the bounty, can I remove it or move it to another answer at a later time? What happens if there's no answer after the bounty period? What happens if I feel my question is still unanswered? What is automatic awarding? Are bounty awards exempt from the 200 points/day reputation limit? How does Community Wiki mode affect bounties? How does user deletion or post dissociation affect bounties? Can I award a bounty to an answer from a deleted user or one where the author was dissociated? Can I offer a second bounty after the first one has expired? Can I raise my bounty? What happens if a bounty question is closed or deleted? Why can't I vote to close or migrate a bounty question? What happens if I delete my account while I have an active bounty? Do I keep an awarded bounty when I delete my answer? What happens if a question where I awarded a bounty later gets deleted or migrated? Can I cancel my bounty? Can I affect / divide / share part of my bounty to two (or more) users? How many outstanding bounties can a single user have?      See also:  in the Help Center
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Possible Duplicate:          I set an incentive bounty on  (before the new bounty system was announced). Once a qualifying answer had been posted, I clicked to start the bounty, and was confronted with the new bounty system. I selected that I'd like to reward an existing answer, but it's still making me wait 24 hours before I can award it!  For this specific bounty type, can the waiting period be waived?
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Originating from this question on Meta Stack Overflow (), we wondered why a specific question was deleted, which met all requirements for deletion, but had a bounty on it.  As Mad Scientist sums up in that post, a question does quality for deletion, even if it has a bounty on it.  Currently, the requirements for deletion are:     If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...      has −1 or lower score has no answers is not locked ...or...      it was closed and migrated to a different site ... it will be   automatically deleted.   This seems undesired, even a bug to me.  Therefore, I suggest to add:     Doesn't have an active bounty on it.   This prevents questions with bounties on it from being auto-deleted.  (As a side note: Questions that have a bounty can't be closed without intervention of a moderator, so why would the Community user delete an open question in this period?)
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If I ask a question on StackOverflow, and find multiple answers to be especially pertinent and useful to my own work, is it appropriate to award a bounty to them?   Others may also find the information useful, but it would be hard to find given the context of the question.  Link:   This is a question that I did not create with the intent to apply a bounty to, and I feel it has received sufficient attention.  I simply want to reward those who shared knowledge that I desperately needed right away.
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A question is eligible for bounty 2 days after creation. Probably because  New questions don't need to be bountied, since they already show up in the New tab and the Active tab and so on (and thus get attention anyways)  . But reality is different In the first 5 minutes after asking you get the majority of views. That has probably *. The view counts drop due to the heavy amount of new questions - thousands every day! If you don't get an answer in the first minutes then you have to wait 2 days to put a bounty on it. Please either remove the bounty delay or reduce it dramatically to an hour or so. * Of course that query does not factor in that question lying around for years have more views than new ones. But the tendency is given IMO.
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Six days ago I put a +50 bounty on  which wasn't asked by me, but to which I'd previously posted a pretty decent answer. Since then I've earned 130 reputation from upvotes on my answer, netting me +80 reputation and a bronze badge from no work.  It seems possible to slowly generate free reputation by "investing" in your answers like this. I expect I could repeat this perpetually and continue to profit from it.  This strikes me as an abuse of the bounty system. Should anything be done to prevent it?  EDIT: For more concrete questions:   If I put another bounty on this question after this one expired, would that be considered abuse? What if I did it several times? ( the answer was  "yes", but the author was doing so to promote his own project.) What if I didn't do it to the same question, but was constantly promoting questions I'd answered, in order to promote my answers?
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There is a question I asked which had an in depth answer. I provided a bounty, but the issue was only semi resolved. Due to new discovery, it turns out the answer was correct in a partial context, and was useful in moving towards finding the answer. I would like to provide an additional bounty to the answer (the answer already has a bounty on it from me). Is this possible?
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I am a non-20k-er on many sites. What am I supposed to do when I encounter a not-an-answer?   Flag it as not an answer? Downvote it? All of the above?   I have 20k reputation on one of the sites. What am I supposed to do when I encounter a not-an-answer there?   Flag it as not an answer? Downvote it? Vote to delete it, if it has negative score? All of the above?   And if the answers to these two questions are "all of the above", why do we need to separate it into multiple actions? Why not have flagging as not-an-answer automatically issue a downvote and, if possible, a delete vote?
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I am not asking...     ... to  for reward-type bounties.   ... for the  the winning answer, either.    My request is this:      When a user sets a bounty to reward an existing answer, existing answers should be eligible for auto-award of the bounty.    It makes no sense to deny eligibility to the answers that the user explicitly wanted to reward.     An Example: Math.SE currently has three 500-point bounties set by a departed user, with the stated reason "reward existing answer". They are set to questions with outstanding and very thorough answers. However, those answers will not receive bounty now, because the originating account has been deleted. The bounties are still there, owned by Community and subject to auto-award rules.
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The FAQ mentions bounty, but sometimes a question just doesn't really have a right answer:   No solution exists The question as written is unanswerable and unsalvageable There may be a technically correct answer, but the asker is unable to utilize it for some reason.   In these cases, a bounty, and more answers, won't really help. What is the appropriate etiquette in these cases? Should the question be closed? Left hanging?
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Change the bounty upper limit to 50k, because 500 seems outdated and cheap.  If a newbie gets a good answer in, more power to them.  Think of it like Jeopardy. Remember about the turn of the century when the rules changed and you could win longer than one week. It was a good change.  Think of it like .  I remember seeing reruns in black and white when it was like $5k.  It was a good change.  There are plenty of users with more than 50k. I looked at a bunch of profiles yesterday with a serious amount of bounty. I would spend every night for a couple months or longer on a 50k solution.  Community benefit: Large open source projects could really get some good exposure with a 50k bounty.  500 I'm asking for 3000 on one question right now.  I have the answer working and won't share it till I get 3k for it.  Don't think me bad. I'm still participating; it's just on one question that the community and blogs can't answer yet.  Maybe if this gets to -100 I'll take it down.  As for my bounty score, I have four stars at asp.net which I made in three months four years ago – exactly halfway to five stars. I'm no stranger to how these boards work and how search engines love linkbacks. One of these days I'll start blogging on my website and link answers back to my website just to get a few more up clicks.
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I stumbled upon some odd behavior that looks like an intermittent bug to me.  On two separate occasions (only a few minutes apart, but it was working fine in the meantime), once on page 15 and once on page 16 of the bounty questions, I got the message      There are no questions with an active bounty at the moment.   Needless to say, that was not the case.  I took a screenshot when it happened first:    Direct link to the site:   It is working fine right now.  Update:  Every time it happens, it seems to affect all pages from the 15th to the last, but only those.  Update:  The reviews page seems to be affected by the same bug:
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At  I was able to award the bounty 25 minutes after it expired. Unfortunately I forgot to screenshot this, there was a message like "This question had a bounty ... that has expired 25 min ago", but the award bounty icon was clickable and so I did successfully. Is this a bug or the answer to the "I missed awarding my bounty in time" problem? The question did not show up under featured questions, so being able to award the bounty within some grace period actually seems sensible.  edit since bounties are now :
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I must have been dreaming, but I could have sworn one was able to award extra reputation points to answers on stackoverflow.com if you felt the answer deserved it.  I'm in this predicament right now, where I was too late with choosing the best answer for a bounty question. I still want to award the answerer the full points, but I can't find the damn option to award extra rep. points anymore. :-/  Have I been imagining this 'extra rep. points' thing?
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To celebrate the , I was just preparing for a shopping spree - for example, I need a good YAML parser for a project I'm working on, and thought I'd add a bounty to  to find out whether anything new has come up since then - only to discover that after starting my first bounty, I can't start any more! Then I saw that the new small print has this to say:  Users may only have one active question bounty at any given time.  This is new, isn't it? It didn't use to be this way. Why is this? Is there a good reason for it? I'm disappointed about this. It imposes an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation and takes away a good bit of my initial enthusiasm for what I thought is now a really great system. Can this please be lifted or at least increased to three or five?  Update: @ccomet and @Jon Seigel make some good points about how an unlimited number of bounties would favour high rep users. While I don't fully agree, I can see their point. I still feel at least three simultaneous bounties would be a fair level. Alternatively, apply the limit on bounties for other people's questions only - that would solve the problem of high-rep users setting the agenda, while everybody can continue to put bounties on their own questions as they like.
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Why can't I give more than 500 reputation as a bounty at a time? The system won't let me choose an option more than 500.  Also, how were some users able to do so? On  the OP has given a single bounty worth 550 rep, but at the moment I have 844 rep and I can't give any more than 500 rep on a bounty.  Can you please tell us if this is a bug or not?
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clearly belongs elsewhere, but the asker already put a bounty on the question.  If the question is migrated, does the rep get refunded? Does the question continue to be a bounty question on the target site if the user has enough rep? (The asker in the referenced question does not have any associated accounts, but I'm curious about what happens.)  Edit: I just tried to add my own close vote, but apparently you can't when there's an open bounty. However, a mod should still be able to close/migrate/etc.