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I don't know where are my points. I asked question, set up bounty and had no time to react (test proposed solutions, choose best answer, grant bounty). What now? I would like to get my points back or be able to grant them to an author of the best answer.

Here is the question in topic How to make Windows guest running on qemu/kvm obtain IP address from physical router with DHCP server?

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    You had a whole week plus a 24 hour grace period to award the bounty. As you didn't award it and no answers have a score of +2 the rep is just gone and no one gets the bounty. See here for more details: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/16065/…
    – Mark Kirby
    Commented Sep 23, 2020 at 11:06
  • Sorry to hear that. IMO this is unfair for both sides, forcing urgent decision (solution takes time to check if it works), and disregarding life beyond the keyboard (life happens). But this approach adheres to all stackexchange community - being soulless.
    – Marecky
    Commented Sep 23, 2020 at 11:34
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    @Marecky Your point is valid. However, it's not really plausible to have a model that works for 100% of the users, unfortunately. There can only be solutions that mitigate the problem. As you said, life happens. Allowing bounties to be retracted is easily and extremely abusable. Allowing users a very long time to grant the bounties would frustrate people who answer, etc. In my opinion, what SE has now, seems quite fair and works for the majority of the cases without it being abusable.
    – Dan
    Commented Sep 23, 2020 at 13:00
  • @Marecky you should also be aware that bounties are usually not a good way to get a complete concise answer because most people don't seek bounties when they have the specialized experience. Overall trend of bounty behavior doesn't necessarily get the best answers in the world.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2020 at 13:31
  • @Marecky - please note that when you "spend" reputation on a bounty you are paying for the increased visibility of the question. You're not guaranteed an answer. The "no refund" policy ensures that the bounty system is used judiciously on questions that are well-asked, otherwise many users would offer and retract bounties with disregard and there would be far too many bountied questions for the visibility bump to be effective. This is why you are not owed a "refund"-- the question received the visibility bump for the whole bounty period.
    – Nmath
    Commented Sep 30, 2020 at 6:04

1 Answer 1

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As detailed in How does the bounty system work?, when you place a bounty, after a week plus a grace period if no answers have +2 on votes or you haven't granted the bounty, the bounty simply expires and you've lost the points.

This is why the bounty page gives you notes that once you issue a bounty it isn't going to be able to be recovered/refunded.

This being said, using bounties to entice people to give detailed answers is not always the best solution - bounties tend to also incite lower-quality answers/posts as well.

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