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I was second to answer a question which as it happened turned out to be decently voted and accepted by the OP. It is currently the top voted answer on the question.

Later another user put a bounty on the Question so in order to gain it, I edited my answer to make it more valuable in terms of info.

But when I read the bounty page it says:

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.

So does that mean that no matter how much I improve my answer, it still won't be eligible for bounty award unless the person offering it manually awards the bounty?

If yes, why are older answers updated after the bounty offer not eligible for the automatic award?

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Generally, the reason that bounties are offered are to get more attention to the question and get better answers.

An answer that exists before the bounty is set, is, by default, considered insufficient, else the bounty would not have been offered. Though, there are exceptions as one of the bounty reason is to award an exceptional answer...

And, because it's impossible for the system to know how valuable the edit to the answer was without having someone manually review every edit, existing answers, even those that were edited, are ineligible for the auto-awarded bounty.

So, yes, you are correct. You will not be able to win the bounty... unless the person who set the bounty awards it manually...

But there's no reason for you to assume that the person who placed the bounty will not award it manually. You'll just have to wait and see.

As a note, Wad is a very active user on the site... it's extremely unlikely that he will fail to award the bounty.

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    I've already explained that... the system has no way of knowing that the answer was sufficiently "fixed". It's all automated.
    – Catija
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:09
  • Ah yes sorry I missed that part. Makes sense. If system were to take edits into account, people would use it as a loophole to make minor edits like changing spell cases and become eligible for award.
    – Aegon
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:12
  • Exactly :D Sorry... I've been caught by it, too. I bet most people have.
    – Catija
    Commented May 30, 2016 at 13:13
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    The upshot is that the rules incentivize creating a new answer rather than improving an existing one. Was this intended?
    – user14111
    Commented May 31, 2016 at 3:25

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