I assigned a bounty to my questionmy question and I still have not get any answer while bounty-end approaches, so I wondered what will happen if nothing changes.
Having carefully read the involved help pageinvolved help page, I only found this:
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.
Following the last sentence above I notice that the bounty is not awarded (which seems somewhat obvious), but I don't know if I'll get my rep back.
So I tried searching Q&A and found this post, which seemed to precisely answer my question, with this excerpt (likely coming from help/faq page too):
The criteria for an answer to be eligible for automatic awarding are as follows:
- The answer must be given after the bounty was started
- The answer must have a score of at least +2
If two or more eligible answers have the same score, the oldest answer is awarded the bounty.
If no answers meet these criteria, the bounty ends without it being awarded to any answer, and is not refunded to the bounty starter.
But I'm surprised it looks quite different from the previous one.
And since the latter was posted more than 2 years ago I wonder if it might be obsolete, so I keep not sure about what happens to my offered rep.
BTW in the case it's confirmed that I'll not get my rep back if no bounty is awarded, I'd be curious to get some explanation about this rule, which seems pretty hard and not really fair: it's like spending money for nobody's benefit, and without getting any service we paid for!
