Where is my bounty gone when there have been answers but no accepted one?

[VolkerBarth]

Yesterday I received an information per mail for a question holding an open bounty:

Reminder: Your Bounty Is Ending Soon! The bounty on your question …

Compatibility of the DbTools API … is ending in 23 hours.

Don't forget to review the answers and accept the best one. If you don't accept, the top-rated answer may be auto-accepted!

When the bounty ended, there were 2 answers to the question:

• One from Karim (with 0 vote)
• One from myself (with 1 vote)

Both were not truly satisfying answers, so I had not accepted one of them.

According to the description, I expected one of them to be bountied. But that has not happened, and now the "Accept" button is gone, either.

Question:

Is this a bug in the SX software or an exptected behaviour - possibly related to the fact that the top-voted answer comes from the question-holder himself and one does not want to support "self-bounties"?

Or is there a trace of randomness specified in the term "the top-rated answer may be auto-accepted"?

Note: This is no deal w.r.t. to the points, at all, it's just comes as a surprise...

[MarkCulp · Accepted solution]

From meta.stackexchange.com :

For an answer to be automatically accepted for a bounty award, it has to meet the following conditions:

* It has to have at least +2 votes
* It had to be posted after you started the bounty

Since no answer had at least +2 votes, no bounty was awarded.

[VolkerBarth · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the clarification. In addition, the linked page points out that after the bounty period has expired, no more answer can be accepted. So this is behaviour by design:)

[Breck_Carter · Accepted solution]

Behavior by design... by The Committee For Overthinking Features 🙂