Duplicating my answer to an identical question on SU from a few moments ago.
Bounties now get a 24hours grace period after they expire in which the person posting the bounty can award it before it is dealt with automatically. After this timer expires, and assuming the person posting the bounty doesn't manually award it, the bounty will follow the automatic award pattern as detailed in the FAQ.
This is quite a new change:
Jeff Atwood
due to a lot of whining valued community feedback on this issue, I decided it can't hurt to extend the auto-award period 24 hours past the true end of the bounty. So, the question will stop being a bounty question at the original scheduled time but the auto-accept calculations will always occur 24 hours after that.
You are correct that this doesn't seem to be reflected in the FAQ correctly.
Also missing from the FAQ seems to be note that the full bounty will be auto-awarded to the accepted answer (if there is one and the question owner posted the bounty) in preference to the highest scoring answer, also a fairly recent change:
Jeff Atwood
If ...
- the bounty was started by the question owner
- the question owner accepts an answer during the bounty period
- the bounty award period expires without an explicit award
... then we assume the question owner liked your answer when they
accepted it, and it gets the full amount of the bounty at time of
bounty expiration.
Also note that I've just raised another question on MSO to get the FAQ updated.
