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I see When a question that had bounties is deleted, are they automatically refunded? is very similar, but this is discussing bounties that expired and were awarded and may have been refunded by a moderator, not bounties that were never awarded and deleted by the OP.

Similarly, this is not a duplicate of How does the bounty system work? because there is no mention of the behavior of question deletion and how it affects unawarded bounties which is the key part of this question. The behavior when it comes to awarded bounties and deletion is clearly spelled out but is not relevant to this question.


Several months ago, I put a 200 rep bounty on https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/234875/opera-on-android-stole-the-diamonds-from-mobile-site (10K only), but the bounty was never awarded (the question was not my own question, but one for a similar issue I had experienced).

Today, the OP apparently deleted the question on his own, and the unawarded bounty was refunded to me. I want to ask why, especially when the bounty was so long ago.

I paid for the attention (although the problem still exists), so why should I get my "fee" back just because it was deleted? The reason I ask is this would appear to be a loophole to allow users who post a bounty and don't get an answer to recover their rep (by getting the question deleted).

My question is ultimately is:

  • Why is a bounty, which is considered a "fee" for advertising, refunded automatically without manually being refunded (as is suggested by the question I linked) when the question is deleted.
  • What would have happened if this was my own question that had an unawarded bounty (presumably with no answers) and I deleted it myself. Would it have still refunded my rep?
  • What will happen if the question is undeleted? Would the refunded 200 rep bounty be un-refunded?

The reason I ask is this would seem to be a loophole that would permit a user to ask a question, post a bounty and if they don't get an answer, allow them to recover the rep via deletion, then undelete or reask the same question, post a new bounty (and repeat until they get an answer).

  • If you remove your own question which you bountied previously, you get the rep from the bounty back. If you undelete it, you lose this rep from bounties again. A user can't recover rep via deleting because if he undelete, he loses all the rep recovered via deletion. – nicael Oct 4 '14 at 7:35
  • @nicael now that you say that, I seem to remember one of your experiments. I am going to guess that this is a dup of that if you actually asked a question and haven't deleted it. Is it still there to close as a duplicate of? – psubsee2003 Oct 4 '14 at 8:43
  • No, I haven't asked this question, because it didn't seem to me to be bug. – nicael Oct 4 '14 at 12:22
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    I think you should just tag this [bug]. This doesn't make any sense as behavior. Someone could delete a question with a failed bounty and reask the question as a new post and place the same bounty again, cc @nicael – Double AA Nov 29 '16 at 21:52
  • @rene not sure the new edit to the faq addresses the case of unawrded bounties. I saw tge deatured post ss well, and it seems both are talking about awardsd bounties. Am I missing something? – psubsee2003 Feb 14 '18 at 8:54
  • @psubsee2003 I would expect that the just implemented feature would also cover this case but maybe I was struck by premature hammering. Let me re-open and raise some attention to this post to see if or how this is now covered. – rene Feb 14 '18 at 12:05
  • @rene Subquestions 2 and 3 are covered in the FAQ, but 1 isn't. I think this should be edited to address 1 exclusively, so it's not a dupe of any question. – Sonic the Reinstate Monica-hog Feb 14 '18 at 12:09
  • @Ano why does the FAQ cover 2 and 3. Everything in the FAQ and the feature post talk about questions with awarded bounties that get deleted. It says nothing about unawarded. – psubsee2003 Feb 14 '18 at 12:57
  • @psubsee2003 It was clear in the previous text, but became unclear after I updated that text with the recent changes...I made it clear again. – Sonic the Reinstate Monica-hog Feb 14 '18 at 13:42
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    Possible duplicate of How does the bounty system work? – Sonic the Reinstate Monica-hog Jul 25 '18 at 2:40
  • @SonictheInclusiveHedgehog care to point to the section in the FAQ that answers my question? – psubsee2003 Jul 25 '18 at 10:37
  • Agree it's not a dupe, if it gets closed ping me and I'll reopen. – Shadow The Princess Wizard Jul 25 '18 at 11:31
  • @Sha Thanks. I can reopen it too, but I'll let you do it so there isn't someone complaining about a "conflict of interest" if it gets closed – psubsee2003 Jul 25 '18 at 11:54
  • Huh, right, you also have discussion hammer. Cheers! – Shadow The Princess Wizard Jul 25 '18 at 11:55
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    @Sonic still, think it's fine to have it as separate question or at least not sure enough to use my hammer to close. – Shadow The Princess Wizard Jul 25 '18 at 15:53

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