Best way to reward an exceptionally good answer [duplicate]

Question

Have you ever gotten an answer soooo good, you wished you could give a +20 instead of +1 ?

Bounty System

That's a good mechanism, but they're not always right for this situation:

• Bounties are usually associated with giving incentive to answer or draw traffic. I would expect that most users offered bounties before getting an answer, not after.

• Bounties are usually offered by people with plenty of reputation. "New" users should be able to reward exceptional answers too.

Thanking in a comment

A warm comment on the answer is always nice, but I'm not sure comments are intended for saying thanks - but to clarify / improve the answer itself.

So what is the recommended way to reward this truly exceptional answer?

Other suggestions?

I know there is an answer of the week blog, is there a way to nominate an answer to be there? Sometimes exceptional answers are hidden in low-interest questions that receive less traffic - so those will never be upvoted enough to become noticed.

Or maybe instead of a single blog for the entirety of SO, there should be an entire section called "Answer of the week" with more than one answer (maybe on a per-tag basis). Answers should arrive there based on manual nominations and not on upvotes so unpopular questions will not be discriminated against.

Clarification:

It's not that I'm personally against bounties - I use them plenty of times. I'm mostly concerned about what other people tend to do. I suspect the bounty post-answer reward is not used as much as it should. I believe the majority of people don't consider bounties for this purpose.

Answer 1

As a user with a sufficient pool of reputation points (on Mathematica) I tried to assist users on my site by starting a "charitable fund" for bounties, specifically to draw attention to (and reward) overlooked or under-appreciated posts.

Perhaps you could convince a few reputation-wealthy users on your site to do something similar. In my case I made it clear that I had final right of approval so it could not be abused; similar assurances would be prudent I believe.

Answer 2

I know you said not bounties, but there's a dedicated reason for rewarding an existing answer. Use it!

Your arguments against them are:

Bounties are usually associated with giving incentive to answer or draw traffic. I would expect that most users offered bounties before getting an answer, not after.

Well, usually, but this reason was added for the sole purpose of encouraging you to do the opposite of that! It is used quite often.

Bounties are usually offered by people with plenty of reputation. "New" users should be able to reward exceptional answers too.

Bounties only require 75 rep. That's not a lot at all.

Answer 3

"New" users should be able to reward exceptional answers too.

Um, no. New users have not yet demonstrated the judgement needed to know what an exceptional answer is. And if they do have that knowledge, they'll have the rep to award bounties soon enough.

Answer 4

Here are a couple you can do with zero reputation: (i.e. even without account)

1. Share it. In Facebook, Twitter, Google+, family, friends... everyone you know. This will likely cause more upvotes as some people ought to have account on Stack Overflow with 15+ rep. If you do have account (even with 1 rep) you might even get shiny badge of your own as result.

2. Look in the author profile if he has any contact information and if so, send him a personal thank you message where you can even offer things like beer coupon. Some people even post things like Amazon Wish List on their profile so you can grant them a wish. ;)