I've seen questions that have a bounty on them, but I'm interested in the answer as well, and I've wanted to augment with the bounty with some points of my own. Can we get a way to do this?  For example:  I see a question with a 100 point bounty on it, and I'm willing to throw 50 of my own points into the mix to make the bounty 150. I recognize that I won't get any control over the question/answer selection as a result, but it lets me do something more than just upvote a question if I want it answered.
121075
Similar to , but a little less extreme..  Basically, you could "top up" the points of another users bounty (up to the current maximum, 500)  Say a question has a bounty of 100 points, I could contribute up to 400 of my points towards it it. When the bounty is resolved, 100 points would be deducted from the original user (well, 50), and 400 from me.  More than one user could contribute (again, up to the maximum limit)  If the question already has a 500 point bounty, this feature wouldn't apply. Also as cletus suggested, you should not be able to add to the bounty within maybe two days of the bounty closing.  Updated Suggestion: Acknowledging the inherent complexity, what if, when offering a second bounty, the user immediately agrees to forfeit control of who the bounty is given to &lt;-- the original user to offer a bounty does so, and further, the bounty expiration remains unchanged. This would help lower rep users.  They might not be able to offer the astronomical +500 rep bonuses that the 10k crowd can.  These +500's certainly attract more views than the +50s.  Presumably, the 10K users also already have the ear of the Stack Exchange Gods and need not beg so arduously for a feature on Meta, or have the visibility on [so] that their questions are answered quite quickly.  Right now, if they forfeited too much rep it would relegate them to maybe barely being able to talk in chat.  They might lose: 'create tags', 'retag questions', 'view close votes', 'reduce ads', 'vote down', 'create chat rooms', 'edit community wiki', and 'set bounties'.  While none of these are huge, it also makes that hope of someday getting to 10k appear infinitely further off in the future...  As an example,  is reasonable, maybe not stellar, but reasonable, so a low-rep user could offer a larger bounty in the hopes of getting on the "someday-we'll-implement-this-when-Jeff-gives-us-Friday-off" list.
83800
I think it's helpful if we can go to a page and view all our own questions that   Does not have an accepted answer, and/or Does not have an answer yet.   The reason I asked for them is because, I sometimes need to review through all the questions, and pick those that don't have proper answers so that I can perform further operations on them ( such as offering a bounty, or accept an existing answer).
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.
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 .
43415
Placing a bounty on a question changes its last activity timestamp and bumps it to the front page, the same as posting a new answer or editing the question or one of its answers.  It would be nice to be notified when someone else is assigning a bounty on one of your own questions - it might be just a notification in the brand new notification tab of the  StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™ instead of a full inbox message.
170
Here's one to get shot down: How about letting bounties to be set using the reputation gained through the use of another site? So, for instance, I'm a programmer with a high Stack Overflow rep who hates using computers. Wouldn't it be useful for me to be able to exchange some of my excess Stack Overflow credit to incentivise a question on Super User?   Or perhaps I'd like to highlight a question on Meta Stack Overflow, but I don't spend my time there.
10454
I was impressed by the effort that Ankur put into his answer to my question "", so I created a bounty so that I could award extra reputation as a way of thanking him for his help.  As the reason for my bounty, I specified, "One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty":    When I went to award the bounty, however, I noticed that I still have to wait 24 hours:    Is this really necessary, seeing as how I started the bounty specifically to award it to an existing answer?
70578
I had  in the close review queue. It clearly shows the question with a bounty, but bountied questions cannot be closed. Either bounty questions shouldn't be used as audits, or don't display the bounty notice.    This is the same problem , except it's happening in the close queue rather than reopen.
17668
As we know, a question with an attached bounty will most of the time get a visibility boost, mainly for two reasons:   Users will be attracted by the potential reputation gain and will check the question to see if they are able to provide an answer, Questions with an active bounty get their own tab - so anyone can quickly access them and see what is available at the moment   But is this "all"? Let me explain a little better. Here on Meta Stack Exchange, we get a ton of  and  questions, and it is not rare at all for those questions to not get an official staff answer (especially for feature requests). Often, someone offer a bounty on one of those questions to increase its visibility.  This made me wonder. I admit that I almost ignore the "featured question" tab here on this site, because I know that some questions may only get an actual answer from a staff member. Thinking about this, I was asking myself if giving a bounty has any other effect on top of getting a question "featured". For example, do bounties have any weight on the likelihood of a question to get in the "hot network questions" list? Is there some other hidden feature that will make the question more visible?  PS: notice - I am not suggesting any change in the current way bounties work, I just want to know if there is something I am missing to see in the current rules.
68027
An attempt to set a bounty on any question results in 404 at the URL   {site}/posts/bounty/start/{post-id}    {post-id} being the actual post id.   I haven't tried every SE site, but given that this occurs on Mathematics and here on Meta...
24927
I have an idea for dealing with a question you badly want to be answered, which no one will answer, even after you've offered a large bounty: cash.  Users can offer cash, and whoever has the accepted answer can be paid, possibly via PayPal.  Does this sound like a good idea?
5345
My rep went over 2,000 today which meant I could edit other people's posts. Great! Then I added a bounty to a previous question, which brought me back down to 1,984...and I can no longer edit other posts. Should this changed? Or is this ideal?
124152
I've seen a few questions I'd like to comment on or give a different answer, but seeing how I don't have 50 reputation (I've been a lurker for years, finally decided to participate) do I really need to ask a few questions before I can comment/answer other people's stuff? Or am I missing something here?  Sorry if this has been answered before, but with a few search tries I couldn't find any similar stuff, even tried google just for "50 reputation stackoverflow" but that didn't give me anything either.
72133
For years, people have been able to spend their hard-earned imaginary Internet points to add "bounties" to questions in order to attract more attention to them. (Because, really, "attention" is the only thing that you can be reasonably sure a bounty will give you.)  But does this extra attention translate into better results?  Granted, any individual question may not be really answerable or is still boring even with the extra carrot. And a question might be so interesting that it would have gotten a ton of (good) answers even without the bounty.  Do questions that have bounties get more/better answers&mdash;in aggregate&mdash;than questions that never had a bounty? Does this vary by site? If so, do bounties seem more effective at a certain site "size"?  Or is it really just a wash, and that all anyone ever gets for their bounty is extra attention?
71590
I think it would be nice to be able to increase an active bounty. A user might initially offer 100 but if it doesn't get any new answers, then the user should have the option to increase it.
84250
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?
27722
I had this question:    All 3 responses were rated at 1 when the bounty expired. Nothing got selected as the "best answer", and I can't even manually select an answer.