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I would like to request a simple change in the way the bounty system works.

  1. Award the bounty the first time an answer is selected
  2. Allow the person who asked the question to change the selected answer

In other words:

The award occurs either during manual selection or when the bounty timer expires.

Changes to answer selection do not subsequently affect bounty points, but allow them to affect rep points

Reasoning: Sometimes a later answer is simply better, but when the bounty expires, there is no way to change it. Even if the answer later proves to be misleading, incomplete or just plain wrong

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  • 2
    Why should this be done?
    – Shog9
    Commented Feb 12, 2010 at 19:35
  • 4
    Sometimes a later answer is simply better, but when the bounty expires, there is no way to change it. Even if the answer later proves to be misleading, incomplete or just plain wrong
    – Noah
    Commented Feb 12, 2010 at 19:38
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    That seems reasonable. You may want to include the 'why' in your request rather than a comment though.
    – Tom Ritter Mod
    Commented Feb 12, 2010 at 19:43
  • When a bounty is awarded, does the answerer get the bounty plus 15 points for being accepted?
    – mmyers Mod
    Commented Feb 12, 2010 at 23:09
  • I wouldn't think so; It would be easy enough to code that if a bounty answer is later reselected, the +15 is now awarded
    – Noah
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 16:49

2 Answers 2

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https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/improvements-to-bounty-system/

This is effectively completed, because

  • bounty system is no longer tied to accepting an answer in any way
  • you can issue multiple bounties on your question if necessary
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You might want to include some sort of mark on the 'Bounty' accepted answer, even if the user changes it. This would get rid of any support cases where someone has the accepted answer and claims the never received the bounty points.

And just a side thought, does the bounty thing prompt an alert box when you try to accept the first answer for a bounty question? This might be a good thing so it makes sure that the user knows they will be giving the rep to that user and won't be able to reassign the rep.

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    yes, it does warn you that bounty selects are irrevocable. And they'll stay that way for the forseeable future.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 3:37
  • I like that. How about replacing the check with a bulls-eye overlayed with a check; The bulls-eye would remain even if the answer was later deselected
    – Noah
    Commented Feb 13, 2010 at 16:48
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    An accepted bounty answer has a gold outline (see one of my bounty answers for an example stackoverflow.com/questions/275130/shutterfly-order-api/…), the outline could remain on the original while the green tick is moved to the new answer
    – Rich Seller
    Commented Mar 22, 2010 at 14:19

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