I'm enjoying bounty hunting more than I expected. I like the challenge of answering tough questions and I am learning advanced stuff from the answers questions I cannot answer. However, I'm getting pretty annoyed at the lack of support for bounty hunting.
On a site like apple.stackexchange.com where the focus is pretty narrow and there are currently only 2 questions with bounties, I don't need tools. But Stack Overflow is too big and diverse.
As I write this, there are 304 questions on SO that have bounties. Probably 80% I have no clue about because they are advanced questions about environments (like Android programming) where I'm far from expert. I think in the past week I've only been able to answer about 2-3% of the bounty questions. (I'm not complaining about that, just setting the stage for the feature requests.) Yes, I can favorite and ignore some tags to help pick out more likely questions from the list, but it's still a very long list. At 50 questions per page it is 7 pages.
Even worse, I cannot figure out how the list is sorted, but it seems to be sorted in some way where I'm more likely to see a question I've already looked at or even answered near the top of the list. So hunting for new questions is really tedious and not what I want to be spending my time on. (That is, I want to spend my time answering questions, not hunting for them.)
EDIT:
After reading the comments, I think perhaps the best solution would be for there to be a 'bounty' tag that is automatically added to posts when a bounty is offered and automatically removed when the bounty is awarded. This would even allow me to search across several sites for questions with bounties.
PREVIOUSLY:
So I'd like some tools. Enhancements to the search feature would be a great place to start.
- Add
hasbounty:1to select only questions that have an active, uncollected bounty. - Add some way to exclude from search results questions I've already answered.
- Add some way to exclude from search results questions I've already viewed.
It would also help to have the Bounty Questions list ("featured" tab) sortable. I'd probably sort by most recently asked first. Maybe highest bounty first. Maybe most recently edited question (where creation counts as editing) first.
Likewise, it would be helpful to have options to completely exclude from the list:
- Questions tagged with ignored tags
- Questions not tagged with favorite tags
If I could get only one thing off my wish list, it would be the hasbounty:1 search option. Then I could use the rest of the search tools to pare down that list as needed.
Oh, and a convenient way to save and re-run searches would be nice, too. :-)
