Are reputation points lost by the new bounty system?

Question

The bounty system has been well-discussed already, but the problem I would like to raise is that of lost reputation points. By this I mean reputation points that were allocated "up front" but never attributed to anybody. I apologize if I have misunderstood the bounty mechanism, but in my experience this happens maybe for around 10% of the cases.

Sometimes the bounty poster just disappears, and sometimes he accepts an answer but doesn't grant the bounty. I even had cases where I received the comment of "Thank you, this worked" with no follow-up action.

I can only theorize that the poster hasn't read the FAQ, or his knowledge of English wasn't good enough, or that he intended to wait the required 2 days and forgot to come back. I don't assume that he didn't care about his reputation points, just that he made a mistake, a mistake that could maybe be corrected in most cases by suitable adjustments to the bounty system.

To minimize the wasting of reputation points and also awkward exchanges between poster and answerer, I would like to suggest the following changes :

1. Remove the 2 days minimum bounty-award period
   This will avoid the need for the poster to come back just in order to grant the bounty. As we are dealing with hardware or software, where answers can be verified fast enough, and as an answer can be accepted immediately if it works, this should also be the case for the bounty.

2. Reinstate acceptance as also granting the bounty
   This will solve the funny case where an answer was accepted but bounty never granted. I was told that there were technical reasons for this separation, but technicalities can be overcome.

3. Automatically grant the bounty to the best answer once bounty period has elapsed
   I don't suggest for the most-upvoted answer to be accepted as it was before, just that the bounty should not go to waste if one most-suitable answer exists.

EDIT

This post is not another one about "why don't I get these bounties". It is about "why are people missing out on using their earned reputation". This never happens when the poster is a high-reputation member, but rather to low-reputation more casual posters, who sometimes blow up a substantial part of their reputation points asking for an answer, then end up never using it. Changing the bounty algorithms may prevent some of this from happening.

Answer 1

1. Remove the 2 days minimum bounty-award period

   I don't agree with your reasoning for this. Answers can vary widely in quality even if the ones that don't work are ignored. As a rule of thumb, better answers take longer to create, though there certainly are exceptions. "Better answers showing up later" isn't a big issue with accepted answers, because those can change. With bounties, it's sensible to be more careful.

2. Reinstate acceptance as also granting the bounty

   I originally liked this, but there are two problems. First, now that questions can be bountied more than once, OPs can and do use bounties to reward people who post second-best but still very good answers. Second, bounties can now be offered by anyone, not just the OP. The answer that helps the OP the most might not be the answer that helps the bounty offerer the most.

3. Automatically grant the bounty to the best answer once bounty period has elapsed

   I don't agree with your reasoning for this, either. While it's possible that user error is responsible for the bounty not being awarded, it's just as likely that the bounty offerer considered all potential answers and actively decided that none of them was good enough to deserve the bounty. Remember that half-bounties are auto-awarded if an answer posted after the bounty is announced reaches a score of two. If that's not happening, that's an independent bug.

Answer 2

Just a contributing opinion from somebody that used to answer a lot of bounty questions. I don't bother with it anymore after the last change. I posted this feedback but it got ignored. The bounty experiment on it didn't help :) But the biggest hurdle for me is that users just don't put enough bounty in. It used to be 100 rep with the 'system' adding 50. But that's gone, too many users only wage 50.

That's just not worth the amount of time I personally have to spend on researching the typical bounty question. Two regular answers give me the same and gets me back to my normal job a lot quicker. The personal payoff from the research is too slight, it is almost invariably 'too localized'.

My call: increase the minimum bounty amount. At least 100, I'd like 200 to increase the odds they care enough to come back and award it.