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I found an answer to which it appears a bounty was awarded to, however, the value stated is 0 and does not show who awarded it. I'm guessing this is due to the bounty giver's account being removed?

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The OP awarded the bounty to himself. That doesn't count. –  Uphill Luge Mar 7 '11 at 21:29
@Hans Passant: I guess it looks that way, however, shouldn't it state that he was the giver of the bounty? –  Tim Cooper Mar 7 '11 at 21:31

2 Answers 2

I believe the bounty was offered by a deleted user. Usually, questions have notes in the revision histories that say when bounties were offered and explain how they were resolved. The history of the question in question has no such note. However, it's well-known that deleted users cause odd behavior, such as dates showing up as January 1, 2001.

Also, the tooltip is broken. it reads: "This answer has been awarded bounty worth 0 reputation by ." From the examples below, we can see that unusual situations don't generally break the tooltips, just as they don't usually interfere with revision histories.


| What happened  |                            |                             |
| to the bounty? |     Old bounty system      |      New bounty system      |
| Offerer gave   |                            |                             |
| it to himself  | SO/posts/1780138/revisions |  MSO/posts/1195/revisions   |
|                |                            |                             |
| No winner      | SO/posts/2788215/revisions |  MSO/posts/442/revisions    |
|                |                            |                             |
| Auto-awarded   |                            |  SO/posts/3138121/revisions |
|                |                            |                             |
| Regular winner | SU/posts/80660/revisions   |  SU/posts/83784/revisions * |

* This one looks like a self-accept at first glance, but it's not. It just so happens that both the offerer and the winner are named Josh.

As an extra bonus, here's an edge case that happened right when the new bounty system was being implemented: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/2961897/revisions I asked a Meta question about it some time ago.

Okay, weird. This bounty from before June 2010 gave as much rep as an auto-accept, but the tooltip says it was a regular accept. There's even an MSO question about it. Gotta head home now, but I'll look into this further later.

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Are you suggesting that the author was deleted and restored in some fashion, or perhaps merged? That would be an interesting scenario, I wonder if merges have messed up other bounties... –  Grace Note Mar 7 '11 at 22:38
@Grace, exactly. Deleted users have all their activities erased as if they never happened. So, the bounties disappearing should be by design, as I understand the system. (It must be nice to have balefire....) –  Pops Mar 7 '11 at 22:51
But the user still exists, is the thing. Whether it's the exact same user is questionable, but in either scenario I imagine those would be restored. On Gaming, we had exactly such. I admittedly haven't done a full traversal of that user's history, though. In the case of something still deleted, I think it wouldn't even show the +0. –  Grace Note Mar 7 '11 at 22:53
What user are you talking about, @Grace? The bounty recipient still exists, but I don't know how you would check on whether the bounty offerer still exists, because that would require you to know who the offerer was. It was probably Sijo, based on the date... but it could be anyone. –  Pops Mar 8 '11 at 0:19
@Popular Unless I'm mistaken, the bounty predates the availability of putting bounties on anyone's questions. This seems backed by the acceptance of the answer at the time. So the only possible person who can put the bounty is the author of the question. –  Grace Note Mar 8 '11 at 0:22
@Grace you're right about the date, but it's not definitive. The acceptance could have been a regular, non-bounty accept, and some other user could have set the bounty after coming across the post two months later, after the system change. Again, I'm not saying it's likely; merely possible. –  Pops Mar 8 '11 at 0:36

I can't tell who started the bounty, but I would guess Sijo awarded his own answer the bounty resulting in 0 reputation change.

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In that case I wonder if the reputation pooled for the bounty is returned (bad) or lost (fair). –  MPelletier Mar 7 '11 at 21:30
The question predates the changes to the bounty system that allowed users to assign bounties to any question. As such, it was the author who assigned it. This information should be in the revision history, though. That change was retroactive and does affect even posts from the old bounty system. –  Grace Note Mar 7 '11 at 21:33
I believe this answer is wrong for the reasons outlined in my answer. –  Pops Mar 7 '11 at 22:49
@Popular Demand - very likely. –  Jonathon Mar 7 '11 at 23:49

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