- How do we award a partial bounty?
- And how would we split a bounty up between several users?
And (3): I believe the two above are not possible, so is this the right place to ask for an enhancement of the system?
Ad 1) It seems the only way to award a partial bounty is to wait until the bounty expires and let the automatic system decide ("Unfair Bounty system?").
It seems even increasing a bounty is not possible, so probably reducing isn't either.
Ad 2) For increasing I guess one has to close the first, immediately offer a second and award it, too. Maybe this is a good practice to start offering a smaller bounty than wanted, and thus have some leeway to award a second one if a good second answer comes by.
Not getting the reputation back is not a bad thing either, but I'd prefer if one would get back a certain percentage. I feel the temptation to just award the bounty to whoever tried to be helpful just to not let the rep vanish in the dark abyss.
And just for reference: This discussion about duplicate answers does not cover bounties.
Any older questions/discussion I have not seen?
Update: On stackoverflow there's a discussion of (2) here and someone suggesting the above mentioned workaround here.
Update2: Hm, maybe this Q needs to (a) migrated to meta.stackexchange.com and then (b) closed as a duplicate. According to Meta on StackExchange a question like mine which affects all sites, should probably be hosted and asked on meta.stackexchange.com.
And I guess "Why is SE split into multiple sites" applies to meta as well with the difficulty that users (like me) should learn when to post to the global meta.stackexchange.com and when to post to the individual site.
I will keep this Q open for a day or so, and if there are no other answers/opinions, I will move my updates into an answer and then request closure from the moderators.
