I posted a bounty on  on May 27, intending to reward it to the person who had a highly upvoted answer that was accepted on May 19. The reason I chose from those available was     One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.   When the time was up, I forgot to actually give the user the bounty. The system didn't automatically give it, even though it was the only answer there when I started the bounty and there are no deleted answers that were ever posted to the question.  I propose that, if the exemplary answer reward bounty reason is chosen and there was only one answer when the bounty was added and none were posted during it, the bounty should automatically be given in full to the pre-existing answer.
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.
119608
When I click on the Bounty icon to award it, I get asked Are you sure, and then I say I am sure, only to be told that it's too early.  , here's the sequence in pictures:  I see my bounty is still outstanding and that I have a great, spot-on, bounty-worthy answer:   I decide that  to award this bounty to a deserving user:   I see that I need to hold that thought for another two hours:    What's worse, is that I did the same thing 3 hours ago.  The only way I know that I can't award the bounty yet is to try (and fail) to award it.  (I guess I could notice on step #1 that the bounty doesn't end for another 6 days and infer that I still need to wait until it ticks over to 5 days.  But I wouldn't want to call that solution intuitive.)
42530
Noticed this many times but was too lazy to post.  So I see a message in my inbox that bounty is completed and now in grace period, however its title says that "bounty expiring soon"    Wonderful (not wonderful of course). I click it, and... guess what?    Ok. So 49 mins left. But the main problem is that time traveling is . (if it is not, please forbid it).
102895
I feel like someone made a comment as an answer on a question with a bounty just so they could reap the "auto bounty" since they are the only answer on it.   I've flagged the bad/useless answer (as a non-answer) for moderator review but the bounty will be assigned automatically in less than 24hrs and I feel like this guy/gal is just trying to cheat the system.   All I'm trying to do is ensure the bounty simply expires and the guy/gal that was trying to cheat the system by putting down a useless guess doesn't get it.   I've answered my own question (properly) and marked it as the accepted answer, not sure if that makes a difference though in this person still cheating the system since I'm the OP and created the accepted answer.   Here is the post:
3915
I put a bounty on  but unfortunately there are no answers yet. Today I received a reminder by email that my bounty is about to expire. The part of the text that seems weird is (emphasis by me):     Thanks for putting a bounty on your question. It looks like there are   still no answers yet. You should consider improving your question to   attract more answers. Could you:      add more text describing the problem?    add or change the tags?    update the title to more accurately reflect the issue?   However, this is not my question, but Sid's question.   Should there be a different text in the email if I put a bounty on someone else's question?  Or also have an email sent to the original author telling them that "a bounty by someone else is about to expire could you please improve your question"?  Because as it stands, the text in the email does not really match the "situation".
34766
Often more than one person contributes to the community coming up with the final accepted answer to a question. However, it is only possible to accept a single answer. Restricting to one final answer does make sense for the sake of referencing that answer later, but in many cases that answer is the product of the input from several individuals. I would like to be able to decide how much of a bounty goes to different users, or some other mechanism to recognize the contribution of multiple users. Of course I could always upvote their previous answers, but this is really incorrect if their previous answers aren't the complete, final answer I've accepted.  What think you metaSOrs?
9153
Can there be a notification for those people that participated in the question in the past (either who asked or answered it) once a bounty is started on it?
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.
112880
What this question is about:  It occurred to me that even experienced users occasionally forget that they either:    received viable answers to existing questions or  need to edit existing questions to get more appropriate answers.   What this question is not about:   I'm not suggesting that we badger "or otherwise nudge" users into accepting answers to their questions, as per this discussion:  I'm not duplicating the discussions about reminding/educating new users to accept answers to their questions, as discussed here:  and elsewhere.   My personal rationale:  I suspect that OPs occasionally hesitate to accept an answer in hope that someone will later post a better answer even though there may already be acceptable answers provided. I know that I have done this in the past and then forgotten about my question, only to remember months or years later that I hadn't yet accepted a viable answer to my question.  For busy people, it's inconvenient to go through your activity history and find the question with the upvoted answer that still was never accepted. The inconvenience factor is enough of a deterrent that busy people don't always do it.   My proposal:  For a question with unaccepted answers for over a year, could we please alert the OP with a link (this is the key feature) to their question with a suggestion to perhaps review their question to edit it if no acceptable answers have been provided (or something like that)?  Perhaps there could be other criteria to prevent obnoxious reminders, such as the question needing to have at least 3 suggested answers or that the suggested answers must have been upvoted at least 3 times or that the question has been upvoted at least once or something like that.
66454
I have an  which had about 6 views. So I'm considering a bounty but I wonder if that will provide any answers. There's a risk someone will just answer with a non-reply just to get the bounty after a few days. (Because it's automatically awarded to the person with the highest votes.) Of course, I could downvote the answer but if it's the only one, it would still be the highest one in votes. I could flag it, hoping a moderator will remove it, thus saving the bounty for a real answer. But if that doesn't happen, then I've wasted reputation to a non-answer.  So, when assigning a bounty to a Q, is it possible to exclude certain answers from automatically receiving it, even if there's no other answer after the time's up? I just don't want to reward someone who adds nonsense to my Q.
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.
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
37055
I offered a bounty to a question and there is a good answer. If I give the bounty to that answer, could I change the bounty to another better answer within the seven days that the bounty is offered?
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.
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....
67073
with no answers.  But still the text of the bounty message says     This question had a bounty worth +50 reputation from juergen d that ended yesterday; you must award this bounty as soon as possible   Please remove the highlighted text if the question has no answers. I can't award it.
120695
For whatever reason when I go to other people's questions that are eligible for bounty it appears that I can put bounty on them when they are not my own questions!  Is this supposed to happen?