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The FAQ on bounties:

  • The bounty period lasts 7 days. Bounties must have a minimum duration of at least 1 day. After the bounty ends, there is a grace period of 24 hours to manually award the bounty.

  • 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.

Taken together with related MSO discussions, I understand the purpose of the grace period is to enable an offeror to manually award a bounty before that decision is automated on their behalf.

However, answers can (rightly) still be posted during this grace period; are they eligible to receive the award (manual or automatic)? Will a question that only receives its second upvote or is accepted during the grace period still receive an automatic award?

What should the correct behaviour be here, irrespective of the current implementation?

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  • I'm torn: On one hand, awarding a bounty to an answer posted after the bounty expired feels wrong. On the other hand, you can award a bounty to any answer posted before the bounty started...
    – Dennis
    Commented Jun 7, 2012 at 14:35

1 Answer 1

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There are examples of answers given after the bounty had expired but still in the grace period that won the bounty.

Manual Example Capturing break/interrupt command

[Bounty started on Sep 26 '11 at 16:34] 1
Bounty Winning answer Oct 4 '11 at 8:13.

Automatic Example How can I make OpenFlow work correctly in iOS 5.0?

Bounty Started on Oct 9 '11 at 18:53
Bounty Winning answer Oct 17 '11 at 0:53

I found these examples using this query. It should be no surprise that all of these occurred after the implementation of the grace period.

What should the correct behaviour be here, irrespective of the current implementation?

My understanding is that when a bounty ends it comes off of the Featured Questions list so it no longer gets the extra attention. If an answer or vote comes in after bounty expires and it earns the bounty I'm fine with that.

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  • This is great; thanks. It doesn't directly confirm the automatic behaviour in respect of answers posted before the grace period but only upvoted/accepted during the grace period, but one can reasonably infer that they will also be treated as though those actions took place during the standard bounty period. Should the more discussion-oriented part of my question (i.e. what the community thinks the behaviour ought to be) be posted separately?
    – eggyal
    Commented Jun 10, 2012 at 9:07
  • @eggyal I'm not a good person to ask if you should create a new question or not since I don't have a good track record on that, but I suspect if you did, you wouldn't get very much traction since most people probably don't care one way or another about these mechanics.
    – Some Helpful Commenter
    Commented Jun 11, 2012 at 17:03

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