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I was looking at the weekly SO leaderboard, and I saw something very weird a few days ago: one person already had 433 week reputation in one day! Surprisingly, going to their reputation tab, they actually earned that much in the last 4 years. So, I waited a few days; until today, the bug was still not fixed.

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This user did not give any bounties this week.

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I don't know why this happened, but I can add some info.

It looks bounty and roomba related.

They placed a 500-rep bounty on their question on Dec 30, 2021 at 18:30. You can see the amount "paid" on that date on their rep graph. The bounty ended on Jan 6 2022. It looks like it wasn't awarded to anyone. What I don't understand is why the bounty would be refunded.

The question was roomba'ed as RemoveAbandonedClosed on Aug 31 2025 at 3:00:00Z- the same day, the user got 460 rep back for that question. There was a rep-recalc event on the user on 2025-08-31 at 9:55:00Z.

What I don't understand is how this lines up with the Help Center page on bounties (and in the page on the privilege to set bounties), which says

All bounties are paid for up front and non-refundable under any circumstances

And the post doesn't seem to meet the conditions for barring reversal of rep events related to the post.

Upon reading https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/997587, it seems that refund of bounties on deleted questions is possible:

What happens if a question where I awarded a bounty gets deleted or migrated afterwards?
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.

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    AFAIK unawarded bounties are always refunded when the post is deleted. The only time bounties are not returned on post deletion is if the bounty is awarded to an answer and the answer's author gets to keep the reputation, at least as of this update. I do think the help centre is misleading though. Both because mods can refund bounties and, while deleting a post thereby removing it from the reputation calculation is likely not technically a "refund", it does return the reputation spent so... Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 4:00
  • @HenryEcker re: frist sentence - interesting. am I to blame late night brain for missing this in meta.stackexchange.com/a/16067/997587, or does that FAQ not state this? Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 9:14
  • The FAQ says questions with unawarded (active) bounties cannot be deleted, a mod has to clear the bounty (and thereby effectively refund it) first. Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 9:58
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    @starball "What happens if a question where I awarded a bounty gets deleted or migrated afterwards? 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." Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 11:16
  • "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." Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 11:18
  • @HenryEcker but that section is conditioned upon the bounty being awarded? oh wait... it says "started or awarded". that's what I was missing. thanks! Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 16:19
  • Oh, surprisingly their rep chart doesn't show that. Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 20:35
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    I'm pretty sure that reputation earned/lost on deleted posts is typically private (not shown to other users). But I don't quite know that for sure and don't have a source handy. Alternatively, it might be that it's hidden for users who can't see deleted posts (10k reputation on SO), but I don't have an easy way to test that myself. @Aadvik Commented Sep 4, 2025 at 22:11

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