I created a bounty on a question not my own. But since then there has been no updates and I'm still having the problem. There still is no accepted answer either. I'd rather have my reputation disappear then award it to the highest answer since there has been no effort done at all and I'm still left with the issue.  My feature request would be to not award the bounty if there has been no activity at all since the bounty start. Perhaps award it if someone at least attempted to improve it's answer. And perhaps refund the bounty, or have it extended for X days.
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
62931
I have seen a number of questions like:     "Do this work for me please" or without "please"   If such a question doesn't have a bounty, I can downvote it if I want or flag it for closing. But if it has a bounty, then it's protected.  Why?  To be clear, I have nothing against "do-it-for-me" questions in real life, but if it's not allowed on Stack&nbsp;Overflow without a bounty why is it allowed with it?  Update: And you can probably close / put on hold such a question after the bounty time is over..  Examples of such questions that I have flagged:   - was put on hold and deleted by TS   - was put on hold and deleted by TS   - flag was declined   - flag was declined   - flag was declined   - flag was declined   - flag was marked as helpful   - flag was declined   - flag was marked as helpful   - flag was declined   - flag was declined
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.
18095
I've asked a question on SO and set a bounty of 50 rep. on it.  Would it be possible to permit me to raise this bounty, if I see that it doesn't get enough attention?
76249
Since  is not really intended behaviour apparently, I propose a period of 24 hours after the bounty has expired during which the question will not be on the featured tab but the promoter can still manually award the bounty. The "cost" of this would be that no new bounty could be set up until the old one were awarded.  Similar to , which got closed as a duplicate without duplicate link... (Well, according to Robert's comment there, it's , to which he replied with basically what I am proposing here, but an answer is not a feature-request...)
51536
is a bit of an odd case.  The user placed a bounty on it, then engaged in a rollback war culminating with a lock. He then requested his account to be deleted. It was. The question, which was at -1 at the time, was automatically deleted along with the account. This should not happen since bounty questions ordinarily can be neither closed nor deleted.  Now the bounty languishes in a limbo state, its clock ticking away in futility, hoping against desperate hope that someone somewhere will rescue it. But no one hears its cries.    Cheer? No, I'm afraid not.
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 .
55747
I think it would be very useful.  I have a question that I have an open bounty on. Putting up said bounty brought my reputation below the point where I am allowed to comment on other peoples' posts. It's so frustrating not to be able to comment and give feedback on the answers given!  Especially since it would be helpful, for them, me, and the readers, to know particularly what is good and isn't good about their answer, and therefore give some better guidelines to future answerers on how they can win the bounty.
76440
After offering a bounty to , I realize that I cannot comment on the question because I no longer have the required reputation. Is it possible to change this behavior, so that the bounty owner can comment only on the post with the bounty irrespective of their reputation? While bounty owners are told that they'll lose privileges at the time they place a bounty, it makes sense to allow them to interact with potential answerers/commentators to help solve the problem, or at least provide additional information.
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?
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".
119960
I don't want to award a bounty if I feel that the user hasn't answered the question in the right fashion. How do I prevent it?
7626
It says in the faq:     If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with at least 2 upvotes will be awarded half the bounty amount. If there's no answer meeting that criteria, the bounty is not awarded to anyone.   Then why I did not get half of bounty for this question:   I need to mention that the author accepted the answer and then declined it; might have something to do with that.
24986
Sometimes you start a bounty and, since the problem is difficult and people try to reach the bounty, there is higher probability than usual that you get very low quality answers. Sometimes these answers even get some upvotes, thanks to a lot of people viewing it. When the problem is so difficult that no one solves it, the investor does not award the bounty and implicit bounty award takes place. It would be extremely humiliating for the investor to see that one of the bad answers is getting the bounty. Therefore I propose to add the following rule:     Do not implicitly award bounty to an answer that has been downvoted by the investor.   I agree this will not probably happen often, but I have actually seen bad answers taking two or more votes. And I think it doesn't make any sense to award an answer which is bad according to the investor, so I think this case is worth handling.  EDIT: I wouldn't mind because someone will gain rep. What bothers me is that answer which is apparently wrong (possibly have been too quick in the urge to win the bounty) will be marked as bounty winner and thus confuse the visitor, giving the feeling that this is a good solution and the question is answered and OP satisfied.. This would be sick! In case of the accept button you have it under control but this can become really weird especially for 200+ bounty.
81307
I posted a  about an unusual issues I desperately needed help fixing. When I didn't get any relevant answers and the project deadline was approaching, I created a 500 point bounty. Since then I have received only one other answer, and it was just a suggestion on how to clean up my code, it had nothing to do with the core issue.  The project went live even with the issue. I found a workaround, but it's far from perfect. I posted my own workaround as an answer, hoping that it would provide more information about the issue, and that if anyone finds the question in the future at least there is a workaround in case no answer is found.  The bounty expires in 4 hours. My own workaround has received +1 votes so far. I doubt anyone will provide an answer in the next 4 hours. My question is, what is the best action for me to take? Should I just let the bounty expire? Should I accept my own answer, even though it's incomplete? Should I accept one of the other answers even though they had nothing to do with the issue, just so that the 550 rep points don't go to "waste"?
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).
20298
There are a few variables here that I was thinking about:   Spend rep to extend a bounty for a certain amount of time Allow the rep spent to extend duration to add into the original bounty Create minimums on the amount necessary to extend dependent on how long it has been up   These are just ideas and can be tweaked as necessary, but the idea in whole is to encourage people to spend more on rep and avoid "wasted" rep because there wasn't a good answer to a question while minimizing the amount of possible abuse. This was part of the idea to spend a small amount of rep to extend duration without adding to the rep so that you wouldn't have to spend the whole amount over again for a couple more days.  The typical use case that I am thinking of is when you create a bounty and it still gets no attention. I think it would be cool if you could then add onto it to turn it into a higher bounty instead of having those points completely gone.  Possible abuses:   Keeping bounty questions alive for inappropriately long times. There is already an answer but the author does not want to award the bounty.   For 1, you can resolve this by increasing the amount necessary to keep a question alive exponentially similar to what is already in place. You could also halve the amount of extended duration per extension. For 2, this is a problem with the existing system as well, but the author does not have a positive incentive not to award the points since he himself still cannot get them back.