I added a bounty to this question stating:
The bounty will go to the best implementation of a right click jQuery plugin.
Preferably one to add/remove right click events from a selector with ease.
Some people are telling me in the JS Room that it is an illegal bounty.
Is this true?
Am I not allowed to spend my own rep the way I want to?
Are you serious?
You've turned an old (2009) question into a "give me teh codez" poll and you are wondering why people don't like it? If you felt the question lacked a canonical answer, you could have set a bounty asking for just that, however your bounty message was:
The bounty will go to the best implementation of a right click jQuery plugin.
...on a question that didn't even mention looking for a plugin:
in jquery is there a way to distinguish left and right clicks ?
Your bounty was abusive, you brought the wrong kind of attention to an old question. Certainly it's your reputation, and you may spend it in any way want, except ways that are abusive to the community and its rules & guidelines.
Am I not allowed to spend my own rep the way I want to?
No.
Bounties were originally very restrictive, because the intent wasn't to turn this into some weird "pay to play" site. When they were improved and expanded, there were still rules in place to restrict abuse and discourage this "rep as currency" attitude, while the ability to use them was made flexible enough for a much larger set of purposes.
However, with the introduction of custom bounty annotations, I've seen a few situations where a bounty is used to change the question. This is bad, for two reasons:
The bounty message goes away once the bounty expires. You really shouldn't put anything in a bounty message that's needed to understand the question or its answers.
If you don't own the question, and especially if there are existing answers, you're effectively making an edit that no one can roll back. That's crap.
I see a moderator has already refunded this bounty, and I support this decision wholeheartedly. If the answers to that question don't answer your question, then you should ask another question. Don't abuse the bounty system to change other people's posts.
I've removed the bounty. From your bounty notice:
The bounty will go to the best implementation of a right click jQuery plugin.
That's not valid for two reasons. First, it's not constructive, and you are the one that's arbitrating the decision of what the "best" is, in that only you can award that bounty.
Second, it's a "gimme teh codez" request. What is the actual problem you're facing? From your statement, there isn't one, it just reads that you are either a) lazy or b) trying to foster a code competition with rules set by you, neither of which is appropriate for Stack Overflow.
To answer your question, no, you aren't allowed to spend your rep any way you see it. We're actually pretty liberal with allowing you to spend your rep how you want (downvotes, bounties) but it still has to work within the general guidelines of the site.
This all leads to the question of why you did it in the first place?
What is it you're really trying to accomplish with the bounty, and what is wrong with the most upvoted, accepted answer that it doesn't suit your needs? If you elaborate on that in the bounty reason, then it would have a much greater chance of attracting the right kind of attention to the question.
