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The OP asks the question here:

question about distance of sets

after what I thought was a reasonable hint and the OP refused to follow it. The question gets a bounty from a https://math.stackexchange.com/users/42344/juan-santos-atahualpa?tab=bounties&sort=offered, while he asks the same question again, using part of the hint in the answer I gave as a 'partial attempt',

The distance between two sets inside euclidean space

what is the rational behind a question should not be closed if there is an active bounty? In this instance, I think the bounty is ridiculous. This smells like a desperate attempt to get out a homework question.

Indeed, I was guilty of answering a question for bounty, the OP consistently showed no work in many different questions:

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/78087/i-want-to-show-e-alpha-tbe2-alpha-t-is-a-gaussian-process-and-i-find/81010#81010

I see this is a potential problems...

EDIT: I now actually suspect https://math.stackexchange.com/users/124140/learner is the 2nd account opened by https://math.stackexchange.com/users/42344/juan-santos-atahualpa?tab=bounties&sort=offered, notice how many question asked by the former had a bounty placed by the latter.

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    $\begingroup$ Good observation in your edit: the last seven bounties by user42344 are all set on the questions by user124140. The earlier 12 bounties by user42344 were almost all on own questions. Then again, this does not necessarily mean foul play: it could be a high-rep user helping a particular low-rep user get attention (maybe they know each other offline); which I think is within the rules. $\endgroup$
    – user127096
    Feb 18, 2014 at 22:23
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    $\begingroup$ @127.0.9.6 ive raised it to the moderators. $\endgroup$
    – Lost1
    Feb 19, 2014 at 0:46

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Once a bounty is started on a bad question, all possible actions that are left have some significant drawbacks. But it shouldn't come that far in most cases anyway, bounties can only be started after two days and if a question is bad enough to be closed, it should generally be closed inside the first two days. If a bad question survived long enough to be bountied, moderation already failed.

The only way to close a question with a bounty is to first refund the bounty. This is something moderators can do, but it would be far too dangerous to give the community this ability. Refunding a bounty after the question was featured for a while would be a way to avoid paying the price of the bounty, so this would be exploitable if the community could refund bounties. And even simply making the close voters aware of all the implications of closing a bountied question would be rather difficult (this is avoided somewhat for mods, we also can't close bountied questions, we have to refund the bounty first in a separate step).

If a question with a bounty has to be closed, just flag for a moderator.

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    $\begingroup$ In which case, i think it is better to let him waste his bounty since he has already got an answer but i think the behavior is not to be encouraged. $\endgroup$
    – Lost1
    Feb 18, 2014 at 20:25
  • $\begingroup$ I was under the impression that moderators have a choice of either refunding or removing bounties (so that the rep just disappears), but your second paragraph only mentions refunds. Is removing bounties in this way not actually possible? $\endgroup$
    – Logan M
    Feb 20, 2014 at 22:48
  • $\begingroup$ @LoganMaingi Refunding is the only option. $\endgroup$
    – user9733
    Feb 21, 2014 at 6:40

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