I asked a question on SO, and there was only one answer given to that. I could not understand that and hence I decided to give it a bounty. Now its 4 days since bounty and I have not received any new answers. The old answer is nether accepted nor having votes. And I don't want to award bounty to that. Now how and who will get the bounty if no new answers come after the bounty ends.?
143
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
38538
It strikes me that the most popular reason for starting a bounty on a question is because the question hasn't received any answers thus far. However, when starting a bounty, whether there are any answers or not, it still presents you with the full array of reasons for starting the bounty.  Three of the reasons should surely be removed in this instance:     Current answers are outdated   Improve details   Reward existing answer     If the screen is still shown I'd advocate that they were greyed out rather than removed for the sake of consistency.  However, in truth, I think I'd go one step further and suggest this entire screen is skipped in the case where there are no answers. Surely in that case, it's pretty obvious that the reason you're starting a bounty is just "there's no damn answers and I need an answer!" (Or, out of the current options, perhaps that should be "draw attention".)
88649
The first time I started a bounty I was able to choose 50, but every bounty since then the minimum is 100.  I still see other bounties of only 50.  Any idea of why I don't have the 50 option any more?  (This is across Stack Overflow and Programmers, at least.)  This is the latest answer I considered placing a bounty on    That particular question does have an answer from me.
22192
Sometimes I have asked a question which got no answers, but is answered in the comments to the question.  How should I handle these questions? I can't accept an answer, so it is never an accepted question.  For example this one:   (ok here the answer in the comments is from me, but nevertheless I also have others of them)
72457
As well all know there are a lot of questions which never get accepted answers.  Some might be justified as no one has answered them yet, or the OP doesn't feel that the question has been answered to their satisfaction. But I’m sure there are thousands of questions out there that can become accepted, and for some reason or another they haven’t been yet.  I have an idea to try and address this.  Now for questions in your profile that have not been accepted for a certain length of time we get a message asking us to consider placing a bounty on that question to help us get the right answer, which is fine.  As accepting answers gives 2 rep points to the user, would it be worth us also showing them ‘potential rep’ so that they know how much they could gain if they where to accept answers in all of their remaining questions.  As an example, someone could have asked 20 questions and only 10 of them have been accepted. They could get a message saying:  “Your unaccepted questions equates to an additional 20 rep points…”  Of course I wouldn’t want it to make people accept just for the hell of it, more to make them remember that they get rep for the accepted answers so it’s worth revisiting old questions to see if any can be accepted.  Thoughts?  Edit    Thanks for the comments so far.  Certainly I don’t want people accepting an answer just for the sake of rep. I suppose I'm just thinking of how we can get people to go over their unaccepted questions again, just in case they've forgotten about some of them, and maybe realise that one or two of them can now become accepted.  For example, if you have someone who’s asked a hell of a lot of questions and most have no accepted answer yet, surely there’s a chance that they might have forgotten about some of those questions.
123175
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.
5147
The bounty I offered on  is now in its grace period and the information box tells me:     you must award this bounty as soon as possible   But there are no answers - what do I do?
84454
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.
20535
I have put a bounty on , however I don't see it appear in the  (also not when I'm not logged in).  Why is this. Aren't all bounty questions supposed to be visible there?
10164
I somehow think this is a dupe, so sorry if it is.  My search-fu is turning up empty...  Do migrated questions retain bounty history?  For example, say a question has a bounty set on one site before enough people vote it closed and migrate it.  The bounty expires on the one site, then it gets enough close votes to migrate.  Is it no longer possible to accept that answer on the target site since the bounty on the first site expired?  I know this probably doesn't happen that often on SO, but I've seen it a few times on SF.  Mainly when the OP doesn't want the question migrated....
16520
Auto-selecting answer for rewards is really annoying   had no good answers so I set a bounty on it. It received one new answer that was completely irrelevant, and that was auto-selected. I do understand the policy of losing the points regardless of if an answer is selected, in order to not motivate people to not accept an answer. But I don't see how the auto-selection feature contributes constructively to anything.  I figured this would have been discussed extensively elsewhere but I only found .
41110
Let's play a small game first:  Illustration: Has the bounty been awarded?  Here are two images cut from two screenshots. One of them has an active bounty, while the other has an awarded bounty. Make your guess base on the images!     Haha I bet you can't, so here's the answer:       and the original (uncut) screenshot:      and the original (uncut) screenshot:     Actually they look identical! Shouldn't that be changed and make unawarded bounty (the "award" button) look lighter like the grey tick for "accept this answer" button do?
421
I asked a question almost as soon as I got my account. I got a few decent answers, but none of them helped solve my problem. The question has long since become buried by newer questions, and there's still no accepted answer. Unfortunately, because there are quite a few answers with votes, to a casual observer it probably looks like the question was answered and I just neglected to mark an answer as accepted, and the system does not consider it "unanswered".  Or, I asked a question that was a bit more difficult to answer. After waiting for some time, I received no answers, little or no comments, and only a few views. The question does show up in the "unanswered" list, but no one has answered my question.  In either case, what's the protocol for me to try to get this question answered?  I see several options:   Post the question a second time, possibly linking to the original, to get attention for the original question. This is encouraged on sites like Reddit.  However, it's probably not appropriate here, since we're encouraged to check for duplicates and not submit a question that's already been asked by someone else, so this probably falls under that heading. Wait for some kind of wiki-like talk page to be implemented, then post a plea on the talk page for input and hope that activity on the talk page bumps up the question. Edit the question, but do nothing further on the Stack Exchange site. If I edit my post to say that I haven't accepted any of the current answers but am looking for more, then the question might get answered eventually by people browsing through old questions to find something they can answer. Post the question on other sites, but link to my original question on Stack Exchange. People will either answer here, or they'll answer on the other site and I can post the accepted answer here myself.  This might be considered spamming, so it might be better to do this without the link.      For more information, see the "" page in the .
113487
Existing, already-answered question:   My own unanswered and closed question:   The answers to the existing question don't answer in any way the question I am interested in.  Now, I was told  that I just should start a bounty on the already answered question.  I just did that, and the bounty ended without helping me at all. The default when I don't specify any answer &#8212; giving it to the answer with the highest score &#8212; does not make sense. That answer does not help me at all. None of the answers do help me.  Now I wonder what I should do. I am still waiting for an answer to my question. My question still is closed. To get traction on it, I would have to start another bounty. I am very short with reputation on Super User, so I can't just always do that again and again.  To not lose the reputation senselessly for the first bounty, I thought I would make a dummy answer and give that dummy answer the reputation. That way, I could keep my question open with further bounties until really got answered. That didn't work for some reason. It seems I just lost the reputation. Was that a bug/problem or is this intended?  How should I handle this? Obviously I cannot just always open bounties again and again until I get an answer. So should I just ignore it and go on to another question/answer site where unanswered questions can stay open?  Or maybe the system should be fixed so I can get the reputation back from bounties that didn't get me an answer I wanted.
81012
I recently put a bounty on a question regarding the . I did this as the only two answers on that page are not satisfactory and I wish to encourage a tractable answer.  I am concerned that when the bounty period expires, if I do not select an answer for the bounty that it may be awarded automatically to one of these speculative and unsatisfactory answers. How might I prevent that? I could put an answer of my own stating "no satisfactory sources are available" and award the bounty to that, however I feel that there should be a better way.  I stress that I put the bounty on the question specifically because the current answers are not satisfactory and I do not want to award them.
59437
I recently had a  where the bounty offer failed to solicit anything useful.  Further research, though, dug up a similar question which had an answer which provided some leads - those leads resulted in an answer.  I asked the answerer on the other question to post a similar answer to mine so I could accept it, but returning today to do so I find there is no accept tick on any of the answers.  The bounty system seems quite broken to me, and really needs some hard thinking about how it should work.  I squandered a bunch of rep (as much as I could afford on SU, which isn't that much) for no results.  Now when I find someone who deserves the bounty, I can't award it - I can't even accept his answer.  That combination of end-results is really annoying.  In my case I found someone who has done me a huge service and I would like to reward that with the bounty rep I offered for an answer to my problem... but I can't!  The only worse end-result would have been to have another answer auto-accepted for me because some well-meaning, but mistaken, individual voted it up during the bounty period without reading my comment that it did not resolve my problem.  And it was only some vague pointers anyway.  Could the system be modified to allow us to accept answers on questions where a bounty was offered and not awarded.  Even better, could we have the ability to award the bounty with the accept if a resolving answer comes in after the bounty period?  Could the bounty system be modified to never auto-accept.  I am OK with removing the question from the feature questions list after the bounty period, but why can't the bounty remain available until I accept an answer?  Perhaps it might only auto-accept after a month or 3 of the question owner not returning to the site?    Robert C Cartino suggested, and I concur:   Half the bounty amount is awarded to the highest voted answer (within the current restrictions). The answer is not auto-accepted. Instead, the banner at the bottom of the question ("This question has an open bounty worth 100 reputation ending in 1 hour") should be replaced with:      A bounty of 100 reputation points was awarded to Robert C. Cartaino [answer link] on xx/xx/xxxx at xx:xx xM.    but I would like to further suggest:   The remaining 1/2 of the bounty remain pending until the OP accepts an answer, if they ever do.   This seems no worse than the current behavior of forever discarding the remaining bounty.
21294
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?