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Recently I've started a Bounty, which is about to end very soon (in less than 23 hours, to be precise). And just a few minutes ago, I received this E-Mail:

Reminder: Your Bounty Is Ending Soon!

Your bounty on the question …

Missing Thumbnails for .swf files in nautilus?

… ends in 23 hours.

Don't forget to review the answers and award your bounty by clicking the bounty indicator to the left of each answer. If you don't award your bounty, the highest scored answer (with a minimum of 2 score) provided after your bounty started may be automatically awarded half the bounty amount!

The actual important part is bold. The problem is, that the highest voted answer doesn't answer the question at all, infact, it's merely a comment! How is this Bounty system in any way fair?

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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What you're missing is that only the answer provided after the bounty started with a score of higher than two will get the half bounty. Which would be this answer.

The bounty system is fair because two people from the community thought it was a "good" answer. If you think otherwise you can always downvote that answer (as it appears to not have worked for you yet). If the answer is edited and solves or answers your question you'll be able to change your vote (if you please) and award the bounty.

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  • I did indeed not notice this... Thanks for pointing it out!
    – user2817
    Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 1:13
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This should work: add a dummy answer to the question when starting a bounty, delete it, and if after seven days there's no decent answer, undelete yours, award the bounty, delete it again.

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    Cheating the system - not the best idea :)
    – Marco Ceppi Mod
    Commented Jan 27, 2011 at 23:29
  • Couldn't this also be used unfairly, so as to avoid awarding the bounty, even if you should?
    – luri
    Commented Jan 27, 2011 at 23:31
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    @MarcoCeppi It's more exploiting than cheating. :P @luri Why would I do that? The rep points are gone anyway, and I think at AU we are mature enough to not act like "Oh, I don't like this guy, he's so not getting my bounty". I just don't see why I shouldn't be able to express "From my POV there's no answer that deserves my rep points".
    – htorque
    Commented Jan 28, 2011 at 8:37
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    I think this defeats the whole purpose of the bounty system and would be against the common ethics of the StackExchange community IMO.
    – Junkbot
    Commented Jan 31, 2011 at 1:11
  • The dummy answer will be deleted, and then, there goes the bounty!
    – EKons
    Commented Sep 2, 2016 at 16:28
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The problem is, that the highest voted answer doesn't answer the question at all, infact, it's merely a comment!

If you don't like the answer that will be automatically selected for your bounty, then you should manually select an answer you do like! In fact, you got the warning email to remind you that the deadline is coming up soon so you can do exactly that.

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