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I edit the quesion according to the comment of professor Edgar

Is it reasonable to suggest to MO to extend the bountiess period from 7 days to 3 or 4 weeks? Can mo be an exception, according to SE policies?

Thank you

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    $\begingroup$ Is the period a policy of MO, or of the entire SE system? $\endgroup$
    – Gerald Edgar
    Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 12:20
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    $\begingroup$ If changing bounty rules either on a per-site basis or SE-wide is in any way realistic, why not rather completely remove the time limit and let bounties persist until there is a satisfactory answer? $\endgroup$
    – Stefan Kohl Mod
    Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 13:36
  • $\begingroup$ @Stefan that is a very good suggestion. $\endgroup$
    – Ali Taghavi
    Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 13:43
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    $\begingroup$ I think it is also relevant in this context that you already offered bounties worth a total of 5150 points. $\endgroup$
    – Stefan Kohl Mod
    Commented Jun 27, 2016 at 14:20
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    $\begingroup$ @StefanKohl. This is a system wide thing. Would they make it possible to have per site overrides for this? I guess not, it is not a big deal and wouldn't justify the work. Would they change it for the whole system? I don't know. It is very unlikely that they would completely remove the expiration period, the point of bounties is to draw extra attention. If the bounties do not expire or expire after a very long time it would defeat their purpose. They have put an expiration period so we don't end up with unreasonably large number of featured questions, particularly on big sites like Stack Overflow. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Commented Jun 28, 2016 at 7:39
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    $\begingroup$ @Kaveh A possible resolution: The bounty would not be expired at all but appearence in feature questions would end after 2 or 3 weeks. $\endgroup$
    – Ali Taghavi
    Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 11:31
  • $\begingroup$ You can simulate a 3-week bounty by using successive bounties, one after the other. I think you have to double the size for each new bounty. $\endgroup$
    – Gerald Edgar
    Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 13:37
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    $\begingroup$ Related feature request on meta.SE: Allow high reward bounties to be longer bounties $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 12:16
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    $\begingroup$ This SEDE query might be interesting in connection with bounties. It compares some stats between all questions and question with bounties (for example, average number of views). I have learned about this query from here. $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 2, 2016 at 12:20
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    $\begingroup$ Only tangentially related to the questions, but it adds some more information to @StefanKohl's comment: SEDE query Top 20 most generous users (bounties awarded in total). $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Jul 7, 2016 at 6:18
  • $\begingroup$ On MO, how much effect do the bounties really have? Are they associated with the best questions and/or answers? $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Meyerowitz
    Commented Jul 9, 2016 at 1:31
  • $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak A similar query is Users by total bounty given. Any appearance of self-interest in having written that query is entirely coincidental. $\endgroup$
    – Emilio Pisanty
    Commented Jul 12, 2016 at 14:50
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    $\begingroup$ @AliTaghavi On math.SE I suggested creating a chat room for advertising bounties, see here for details. Originally I wanted to wait how this works on that site and mention it here only then, but the room is inactive since the creation :-( $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 6:23
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    $\begingroup$ @Kaveh I also think that it is most probably network-wide setting and cannot be change per-site. But do we know for sure? Do you happen to have some link (meta.SE, help or elsewhere) confirming this? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Sep 2, 2016 at 10:25
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    $\begingroup$ I have recently made this post which is - to some extent - related: What would be good place to list unresolved bounties? $\endgroup$
    – Martin Sleziak
    Commented Dec 24, 2017 at 14:20

2 Answers 2

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Although the question asks about bounty period, I guess that the most important thing for the OP is whether the bounty brings additional attention and increases chance of getting the question answered. I wonder whether this could be done without changes in the bounty system and bounty period.

What about the following proposal? (If there is need of more detailed discussion, I can post it as a separate question. But I thought that posting it here first to get at least some feedback of the MO community would be reasonable.)

It seems that the OP has mainly the following situation in mind: A user offers a bounty for some question, but they do not receive the answer they were hoping for. Although they might continue adding new bounties indefinitely, they would rather quickly run out of reputation points. Are there other possibilities to attract attention to such questions?

Proposal. What about creating a separate place for this purpose, either in the form of a chat room or as a separate thread here on meta? Here such questions could be collected. That would be beneficial to the users who offered the bounty - in that they would get additional attention for the question. And it would be also good place for users who are looking for interesting questions.

It would be not the first thread collecting interesting questions on this meta: Interesting (and not sufficiently answered) questions on math.SE But perhaps chat room would be less intrusive than a separate thread. Whether the chosen implementation would be to create a chat room or a thread on meta, I do not think it would fill too quickly if the condition for posting would be that at least one bounty has already been placed on the post. (This condition would also prevent users from misusing this by posting there all questions they have.)

I have made a similar proposal on Mathematics site. It seems that the suggestion was met with some enthusiasm judging from the upvotes on meta. (You can also have a look at the rules proposed there - the conditions which the question should meet before it is posted there.) However, the chat room created for this purpose is so far almost unused. (But I would wait a bit before calling this a complete failure. Maybe I was also at fault for not promoting the idea among math.SE users enough. Since there is an overlap between userbase of the two sites, perhaps my post can as a side effect also help to promote that chat room, but the main purpose of this post is to find out what MO community thinks about something similar here.) Considering that MO and Math.SE are rather different (if we compare the size of userbase, activity on meta, rate of asking questions, etc.), it is possible that it could work on MathOverflow even if it fails on Math.SE (and vice versa).

I will add a few comments about the questions posted by the OP - which are unrelated to the above proposal.

Is bounty period sufficient? Here we should first ask: sufficient for what. The purpose of the bounties is partly to incentivize answerers, but mainly to bring attention to the question. So efficiency of the bounties can be measured based on the number of additional views. I guess users skilled with Data Explorer have certainly created various queries examining this, see for example here.

The additional attention depends also on the size of site - mainly on the number of users. And also on the number of bounties. (It is difference whether the additional attention is divided between 10 featured question and 100 featured question. So from this viewpoint making the period longer might increase the number of featured question and be actually counterproductive.)

Can bounty period be changed? The important question here is whether SE team adjusts such settings individually per site or only for the whole network. Although I have no official source of this, it seems that things related to bounties are network-wide settings. See, for example, here, here and here.

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In a related thread, it was pointed out that

it seems that some users would consider having somewhere complete list of past bounties a good idea

While it does not do much for extending the bounty period (including very prominent advertising, and the reputation award for people who answer), it is possible to access the list of all bounties on the Stack Exchange Data Explorer (with some bugs for pre-migration bounties like this one, which behave pretty wonkily anyway). The relevant query is this one:

Recent bounties on Stack Exchange Data Explorer

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