How long should I wait before posting a bounty?

Question

How long should I wait before posting a bounty? Two weeks? A month? This is considering the question is cycled upwards. Assuming the question has either no answers or just a few plausible but yet unhelpful answers, and I want to attract more people to answer (seeing as how I have not accepted an answer) how long should I wait for someone else to respond to the question? I would imagine a minimum of a week and I'm only willing to extend past two months. (This isn't meant to be opinion-based. I want the actual experience of users who have posted bounties before or let a question like this simmer for a month.)

Answer 1

It's a judgement call and depends on the specific circumstances. Here are some factors to consider:

• The software allows you to post a bounty starting when the question is two days old. (And it must be open.)

• Bounties increase exposure, so if your question is currently getting a lot of attention already, the bounty won't make as much of a difference and you might be better off waiting.

• If the question is attracting close votes or comments requesting clarification, that might indicate a problem with the question that you should fix before drawing more attention. You want your question to be in good shape before adding a bounty that shouts "hey, look at me! answer please!". A bounty pays for advertising, not for an answer. If the question is unclear or too broad, you might spend those points and still not get an answer.

• If you urgently need an answer, you might want to offer the bounty sooner rather than later.

• I don't know if there is data about timing. A bounty runs for up to a week, so it shouldn't matter when you start it, but there's a little extra impact of that blue "+100" (or whatever) being on the front page in addition to the bounty tab, so maybe Sunday morning UTC isn't the best time. (Traffic is lower on weekends than weekdays.)

• During the bounty period you should be available to respond to questions, and at the end you want to manually award it. Don't start a bounty and then go on vacation in the land of poor network access. :-)

• It's always ok to pop into the site chat room and ask for advice about a specific question/bounty!