Case of answer accepted, but bounty not awarded

Question

My faulty understanding of the bounty system may have caused me to mislead the poster, and this is what happened:

• The post Initiate windows feature update after snoozing by user aggieNick02 had no answers.
• User Ramhound added a bounty.
• I answered and solved the problem.
• User Ramhound indicated his unwillingness to award the bounty, since apparently it was done by mistake, with which the poster did not agree.
• I assured the poster that by accepting an answer during the bounty period, the bounty will be automatically awarded.
• But this did not happen.

Which condition for bounty awarding did I miss out on?

Answer 1

From the bottom of the bounties page, which you can find in our help centre:

How is a bounty awarded?

The bounty period lasts 7 days. Bounties must have a minimum duration of at least 1 day. After the bounty ends, there is a grace period of 24 hours to manually award the bounty. Simply click the bounty award icon next to each answer to permanently award your bounty to the answerer. (You cannot award a bounty to your own answer.)

If you do not award your bounty within 7 days (plus the grace period), the highest voted answer created after the bounty started with a minimum score of 2 will be awarded half the bounty amount (or the full amount, if the answer is also accepted). If two or more eligible answers have the same score (their scores are tied), the oldest answer is chosen. If there's no answer meeting those criteria, no bounty is awarded to anyone.

If the bounty was started by the question owner, and the question owner accepts an answer posted during the bounty period, and the bounty expires without an explicit award then we assume the bounty owner liked the answer they accepted and award it the full bounty amount at the time of bounty expiration.

Your answer only has a score of 1 rather than a score of 2 as would be required for automatically awarding the bounty.

Answer 2

Mokubai has marked this behavior "by design". From his quoted link and my own long experience here, I theorize that this is what happened.

At the beginning, SU functioned entirely according to the forum rules as quoted by Mokubai.

Then there was a complaint by members, myself included, that users were accepting answers but not understanding that awarding the bounty is a separate action, resulting in reputations being entirely or half-lost and some answerers not being rewarded for their efforts.

There was then done a correction to SU, so that acceptance during the bounty period caused the awarding of the bounty once it expired.

However, it seems that this correction was done in such a way that it applied only to bounties by the poster. For some reason, the case where the bounty was from another user was not included.

This case, being extremely rare, may not at all be worth fixing.

_{The author of this answer is not an acting member of SU and this answer is not official nor based on any real facts.}