In this question: facebook: why I can't send email from app to user? I was awarded a bounty on an auto-accept after bounty expiration. It also appears the question owner accepted my answer after the bounty expiration and partial award.

It was confusing to determine exactly what happened based on the information available on the site.

Most problematic is the alt-text on the checkmark by my answer, which is "The question owner accepted this as the best answer yesterday. This answer was awarded a bounty of 275 reputation"

Reading this, I incorrectly concluded that the owner accepted my answer, and then I was awarded a bounty, which left me wondering why the partial bounty award.

It would be nice to put the two sentences in the alt-text in chronological order (OK, maybe they already are chronological in a literal sense if bounty awards are a daily batch process, but you know what I mean).

It would also be helpful to use different text for auto-accepts, for example "This answer was auto-selected to receive a partial bounty of 275 reputation"


This was fixed in the last round of bounty improvements:



It is really misleading text.

I created this login here in order to complain about the auto-awarding and especially the text.

My story, and I don't think this is the first time this has happened to me, is:

I've just had a bounty on a question I posed expire without actually getting a good answer, and the bounty has been auto-awarded.

That I'd posted the bounty on a weekend and so had trouble getting back to the problem in time was, well, irritating but not impossible.

And the giving points away I can live with - I valued the question enough to put a bounty on it. I don't care that an answer I wasn't happy with got those points either.

I do care that the question was auto accepted - it claims that I think that it was a good answer, and it discourages others from trying to answer the question properly, and it stops me accepting a later answer I deem correct.

I don't want the question closed, I want to put a bigger bounty on it!

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