I feel that there should be a period of time after a bounty expires before it is automatically assigned. This way, each bountied question can have its full 7-day timespan for meaningful answers to be added, and no bounty offerer will have to cut a bounty period short or risk missing out on being able to assign a bounty.  A period of 12-72 hours would be more than sufficient IMO.
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...)
65778
I've read the FAQ, the blog post announcing the decoupling of bounty from answer accepting, and many of the questions here relating to bounty, but I still haven't figured out why this bounty system works so non-intuitively.  Here's what happened recently:   I asked a question on StackOverflow Having received no answers, I added a bounty. Someone provided an answer. I accepted an answer   Why would I not expect that in my accepting of that answer that my bounty would automatically be awarded? Luckily, the answerer notified me that the bounty would expire and only give him half (!?).  I understand that:   Others can now offer bounty on a question they didn't ask &ndash; it makes sense that bounty would have to be manually in those cases. Bounty can be auto-awarded when it expires.   However, I don't understand why with what seems like the most common scenario, we wouldn't auto-award the bounty to the answerer of the actual accepted answer. What is the purpose of making it more difficult to do what is obviously intended?  Note: I didn't notice  or maybe just didn't realize that the bounty system had changed since I had last used it. This popup should make it clear that "you haven't awarded your bounty to this answer" which is not intuitively obvious, which should lead us to question why awarding the bounty is a separate step.
46015
I've been seeing this for a while now, especially on the  tag.  A user will ask a question (usually very simple, and mostly a duplicate of older questions. But that's for another day).  The user will get one or more answers that successfully answer the question. A little bit later, usually around 5-10 minutes but can be more, another user or users will come along (mostly low rep users) and post the exact same solution, sometimes changing the wording a bit, but sometimes being lifted word for word from the other answer(s).  This is slightly different from the Fastest gun in the west problem. I have nothing against answers posted in very quick succession that solve the problem. The ones I'm talking about are answers posted long after the first correct solution, that say the same thing.  A good example of this is available . All three answers say the same thing. One offers code + explanation (first answer), the second one (three minutes later) offers only code and the third one (a full eighteen minutes later) offers only a text answer.  How should answers like this be dealt with? They are adding nothing of value to the community, as the problem has already been answered. The person posting the answer could not have run into the "The other and I posted the answer so close to each other we didn't know about duplicates until after posting" problem, as there is an eighteen minute gap.   is another example.
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).
83565
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 :
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.
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.
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.
85199
Timeline:  Asked a question, no (interesting) answers for two weeks  Set bounty on it this morning  Found the answer to my question two hours later. Answered my own question.  Bounty reputation is lost. It was not awarded to me, it was not returned to me (the 100 I invested).   Right now, I feel really stupid for answering my own bounty question.   If this is accepted behavior, then user should be warned - you are answering your own bounty question, your bounty reputation will be LOST.
86722
I think it would be useful if we had an option when deciding to open a bounty on a question that we could choose to allocate rep from one site even though the bounty is being offered on another site.  For instance I would like to use my rep from SO for putting a bounty on a question that resides on SF. I don't have enough rep on SF to make it enticing. So when you click on "start a bounty" you get sliders for each site that you can pull your rep from, maybe make it where you need to burn up all your rep for the site that your asking the question on and then allocate more rep from other ones, if you have it.  thanks devinb for clearing up my question with your comments! " transfer rep INTO a bounty. But you can't transfer rep across accounts. So, the rep you'd 'lose' from SO would never actually go into your SF account, it would go straight onto a bounty on whatever question." – devinb
76204
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?
73844
Currently, authors can't  their own question   if it has multiple answers if it has a single answer with one or more upvotes, even if it has a negative score if it has an answer with an awarded bounty   I ask that another criterion be added, to prevent authors from deleting their question within 24 hours of an answer being posted.  It happened to me, , that a relevant question of reasonable quality was asked, some time consuming research went into creating an answer, and as soon as that answer was posted, the OP immediately deleted the question. This happens often with questions asked for work purposes, and .  This behavior is hard to provide feedback on, or to moderate for multiple reasons:   The community loses content (the question and the answer) without having a realistic time zone independent chance to notice or vote on it. There is no natural way to contact the OP without spamming unrelated questions. There is no way to flag the behavior as deleted questions are not flaggable by ordinary mortals The current UI does not discourage this behavior in any way, so it may not even be intentional.   Also, per Tim Post at the :     We have things in place specifically to stop people from potentially wasting their time by answering questions. You can't delete your own question if it has multiple answers, or a single answer with a score of one or higher. That generally stops it, what remains is the edge case of great answers not getting a chance to see votes before being removed.   Addressing the edge case is very simple, however.  I believe that even a relatively short protection period is sufficient to ensure an upvote on any high quality answer; but, more importantly, habitual or intentional answer snatching will become less practical, and honest question posters will better understand the public purpose of the site.  (While this does make it a little harder to delete one's own question after the OP genuinely changed their mind, there is a plenty of better ways of stopping to make a fool of oneself: improving one's question through edits, self-answering it, asking the answer owner for cooperation on deletion, waiting a day before deletion, flagging the question for closure, or requesting to be dissociated from the post.)
102449
on the premise that it "wasn't getting any attention" and now it has gotten a bunch of helpful answers which all help me in some ways making it impossible for me to decide which one to award the bounty to.  Shouldn't there be an option to award the bounty equally among selected answerers, especially in this case where was getting no answers whatsoever before the bounty, or am I overthinking it and should award it to the first answer?
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?
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.
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?
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?