An Unclaimable Bounty?

Question

A bounty has gone up for this question and, given the number of upvotes, it's certainly something that a number of people would like to see an answer for:

However, the comment from Jalil has me wondering a couple of things:

• NixOS is off-topic here. Does this make the bounty off topic?
• A solution that works for Ubuntu 20.04, the version tagged by the question author, may not work for NixOS. Does this make the bounty more or less unclaimable, as the solution would need to work for NixOS ahead of Ubuntu?

While the bounty is certainly an effective way of getting this question in front of people again, I wonder if it should be cancelled. That said, would the 50 points escrowed by Jalil be returned to him if the bounty is nixed? My understanding is that once a bounty amount is removed from an account, it is never returned.

Answer 1

Basically: not our problem.

The site deals with Ubuntu. If the person who offered the bounty gets a solution that works for Ubuntu but not for NixOS so they feel they cannot award the bounty, then the system will just award it automatically as explained in https://askubuntu.com/help/bounty:

If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full amount, if the answer is also accepted). If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.

Yes, the moderators can refund bounties but this is done very rarely since we don't want people to just open bounties and then retract them all the time. I would argue there is no reason to refund, if the user who offered the bounty didn't want an Ubuntu answer, they shouldn't have added a bounty to an Ubuntu question.