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I came back to the site today for the first time in a while to see that my rep was +1,300 or something. Obviously there's always some residual rep gain from old questions and answers being upvoted. But I thought that was a little on the high side. Apparently this question from August was given a 500 rep bounty on 19th March and 24th March.

I mean, I'll take it. But I was just a little surprised. Community doesn't award bounties, does it? The timing also seems very random for a question that hasn't had any other activity since September.

Out of sheer curiosity, why did this happen? Was a human involved?

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Those bounties were awarded by a user who has since deleted their account. You can see from the revision history of the question that it was the user now known only as user112267 (the question OP). Since that account doesn't exist any more, the ownership of the bounties (like many other things from deleted users) is transferred to the Community bot.

So yes, there was a human involved. That human both set the bounties and awarded them, although for some reason in the revisions page the awarding of the bounty is attributed to Community while the setting and removing of the bounty (the latter coinciding with the bounty awarding, of course) is attributed to user112267.

On the Community bot's activity page, you can see it has voted over 50,000 times and has nearly 3,000 helpful flags and 10,000 edits. That's one busy bot! Those are also activities of deleted users which are now attributed to the Community account. It has also offered 113 bounties worth 22,800 reputation - again, all from various deleted users.

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  • Ah, capisce! Again, out of sheer curiosity, do you know how Community decides what answer to reward? Presumably it doesn't know what the original user's intent was.
    – The Dark Lord
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 9:37
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    @TheDarkLord The bounties were awarded manually before the user deleted their account; just for some reason it shows as "chosen by Community" even though "notice removed by user112267". I've edited to address that.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Apr 15, 2020 at 9:42
  • There are also instances in which Community awards bounties on its own. If a bounty offerrer does not select a winning answer, half of the bounty is awarded by Commnunity to the highest scoring answer posted after the bounty.
    – Alex
    Commented Apr 17, 2020 at 1:00
  • @Alex I know, but that's not what happened in this case.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Commented Apr 17, 2020 at 6:34
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There were 2 500 rep bounties placed on the question and apparently awarded to your answer by the same user, the one who asked the question. However, in between the bounties being awarded and you coming back the user has requested deletion of their account. As there is now no owner of the bounties the Community user takes ownership of them.

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