I deleted my question and then the bounty amount got refunded, why? This can be exploited to create infinite bounties.
1 Answer
It does indeed appear that your bounty was refunded as part of the question being deleted.
The answer is at When a question that had bounties is deleted, are they automatically refunded? which shows bounties being refunded. This is a feature, not necessarily a bug.
If you were to place a bounty that was successful and/or got an upvoted answer you would not be able to get the bounty refunded after a question is deleted.
Bear in mind that any upvoted answers will block a question from being deleted and as a result will block this kind of abuse.
It is not an "infinite bounties" hack, more it is a refund of wasted points.
In this particular case you lost the points from the two upvotes your question had, and got your points lost as a bounty back.
There is also a question on Meta Stackechange How does the bounty system work?
What happens if a question where I awarded a bounty later gets deleted or migrated?
If a question on which you have started or awarded a bounty on later gets deleted, then in most cases, your reputation is refunded. It can take a few minutes for this to happen. If the question is later undeleted or migration is rejected, the reputation is deducted again.
There is one exception to the above rule, however: if the bounty was awarded to an answer, and the author gets to retain their reputation upon deletion (i.e. their answer earned a score of at least 3 and was visible for at least 60 days), the reputation is not refunded to the bounty starter.
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But according to What is a bounty? How can I start one? bounties are non-refundable– marbensCommented Aug 11, 2022 at 14:58
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@TheRandomGuyNamedJoe12 under normal circumstances and assuming that you actually do get an answer they are. There are edge cases where they can be refunded, but the general gist of that page is right. When you start a bounty you should expect to lose those points regardless of whether you like the answer you get. Apparently though some consideration has been given to those who never actually get an answer. If you wish to get the wording on that page changed then you may wish to post a question at meta.stackexchange.com requesting it.– Mokubai ModCommented Aug 11, 2022 at 15:21
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@TheRandomGuyNamedJoe12 there is also a more in depth question at How does the bounty system work? where there is a section about questions that get deleted. I will copy it into my answer.– Mokubai ModCommented Aug 11, 2022 at 15:25