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When the bounty system was created it seemed reasonable to set the minimum bounty at 50 reputation. However there are now hundreds of questions under the featured tab. It seems the featured tab has become less useful due to the large number of questions it contains.

We should consider removing 50 rep bounties from the featured tab. While we would still allow 50 rep bounties, they would largely be considered tips for existing answers, since they would no longer bring the question onto the featured tab.

They would still act like bounties in every other way, such as bumping the question, but merely wouldn't show up on the featured tab.

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    Only on Stack Overflow, though. For most SE sites the average number of featured questions at any one time is probably about 2 or 3. – David Z Sep 6 '11 at 21:04
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    it's called inflation!!! – shabunc Sep 6 '11 at 21:04
  • Not related: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/99062/… – Pollyanna Sep 6 '11 at 21:07
  • Has there already been an effect on the number of featured questions by the recent change that up to 3 concurrent bounties per user are allowed now? – Hendrik Vogt Sep 7 '11 at 8:50
  • @Hendrik We've had hundreds of featured questions for awhile now, so I don't think it's due to that change, although I can see that compounding it. – Pollyanna Sep 7 '11 at 11:39
  • @Adam do you consider this completed? – waffles Sep 21 '11 at 1:29
  • @waffles The solution appears to be a reasonable approach. – Pollyanna Sep 21 '11 at 1:46
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The Colbert Bump has now been applied to the more expensive bounties on the main featured list.

The sort order is kind of elaborate, I should document it:

  • Bounties are sorted by the date they finish (decending) with a slight modifier.
  • Bounties in the last day are sorted by the date they finish
  • Bounties receive a 1 day boost in the sort order for each 100 rep (but the boost may never exceed a 6 day boost).

On SO this means that 500 point bounties will show up in the list from the day they are offered (going by current stats).

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Instead of not showing the 50 rep bounties I would rather see a way to filter the featured question list. A search axis of Featured would be good, then you could use that in conjunction with tags or whatever search terms.

Featured:1 [SomeTag]

Featured:1 some search terms
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    This is already partially possible: search for [tag] (e.g. [css]) and then there is a featured tab (10 items right now) among the newest, faq, votes, active and unanswered tabs. If there is no featured tab, then there are no questions with bounties within this search tag. This does not work for search terms though. – NGLN Sep 6 '11 at 21:30
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    Maybe even search by size of the bounty? Bounty:100 shows all bounties of 100 or more. – Paŭlo Ebermann Sep 7 '11 at 1:02
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At present the “front page” on SA shows me the questions I am most likely to be able to answer given the questions I have answered in the past. I think the featured question page should do the same.

Also I think the size of a bounty should have some effect on how often the question is “bumped” to the front page.

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  • That last line is intriguing - however, given that the site is busy and there are a good number of bounties , that needs to be a little cautious. – Marc Gravell♦ Sep 8 '11 at 8:33
  • That's a good fourth option. I'm intrigued by the bumping suggestion. I wouldn't want to see any one thing bumped more than once a day though. Since the front page is fiiltered, even for bumped items, then I don't think it would be too bad, and a lot of bounties would get answers more quickly than they do now (many bounties only get good answers near the end of the 7 day period, as they get to the top of the featured page). – Pollyanna Sep 8 '11 at 12:07
  • @Adam, I think bumping upto about 5 times a day at different rammon times we be OK, as it will be different people on the site. The number of bumps per say could depend on the size of the bounty. – Ian Ringrose Sep 8 '11 at 12:35

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