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Let's say, hypothetically, that I have a friend X who might require reputation.
Could I award him a bounty of 500 for answering one of my seemingly legitimate questions? Even if he has 1 reputation?
Does that trigger some kind of script?
Is it against the rules?
Reputation is meant to be earned, not given. So if you're knowingly posting a question, having a friend answer it, and giving him a bounty to give him a boost on his new account, I believe this to be against the rules. You might get away with a couple of times, but soon enough someone will notice.
By making a user earn reputation, Stack Exchange limits the speed with which they gain privileges, forcing them to learn about the Stack Exchange Q&A model and how it differs from traditional forums.
Giving a user a direct 500 rep boost will grant them more than half of all privileges almost instantly. Such a user will then be able to comment, retag questions, flag, vote up and down, create chat rooms, set bounties, edit Community Wiki posts, and close their own questions, without really having learnt what each of these means and what the consequences are.
Other option. They will look into it
Mar 2, 2013 at 19:04
@RaghavSood mentioned that You can get away with it a couple of times. A couple of times seems more than enough to give an inexperienced user those privileges.
On a site like Stack Overflow, where there are sometimes over a hundred bounties placed on a single day, it seems inadequate to hope that users will manually figure this out. Especially if the user is smart, and keeps a 2-3 week time gap between bounties.
My suggestion is that there should be an automatic script that detects such bounties, and asks mods/trusted users to verify if they are true.
