Declined flag - What should have I done instead?

Question

I flagged a comment in this answer ( or maybe I flagged the answer itself, can't remember which) with the custom reason "There seems to be a problem with a bounty".

My intent was to bring the situation to the moderators attention. Regardless of there being a bug or not, there was in fact a problem with the bounty. And apparently the problem was that a user didn't know how they work (of course I had no way of knowing this).

The flag was declined. Is there anyway to flag the answer with the same intent I had, but make it acceptable? What should have I done instead of flagging as I did, i.e., instead of flagging with the aforementioned reason?

One possibility is to simply let the users know they can flag for moderator attention (but I suspect such a flag would probably be declined too). However, I didn't feel like interacting with them and doing what I did seemed like a viable alternative.

Edit:

In view of the comments and answers below, let me point out that the question "What should have I done instead of flagging as I did, i.e., instead of flagging with the aforementioned reason?" is still unanswered.

One point people are making is that there was no problem with the bounty, but as I said, I had no way of knowing this. Of course I could be wrong and I could have a way of knowing this. If I'm wrong, how could I have known it? Relevant comment to this paragraph.

Answer 1

You flagged a comment to the answer with the following reason:

There seems to be a problem with a bounty.

After inspecting the situation, there was actually nothing wrong. The asker didn't manually assign a bounty, and the criteria for automatically awarding the bounty wasn't satisfied by the lone answer. In short, the system worked as designed.

I did write a comment communicating this to the asker, but afterwards was left with the issue of the comment flag. In difference to post flags, comment-flags leave two options to the moderators: delete the comment (marking the flag as helpful) or dismiss/decline the flag. Since deleting the comment didn't seem to be appropriate, I declined the flag. (There is a recent feature request on MSE to make more options available to moderators when handling comment-flags, but there is at present nothing to suggest that it will be implemented anytime soon.)

Had you flagged a post instead there would have been more options available to me. (In short, you should only flag comments when there is something wrong with the comment itself. Flagging a comment to bring moderator attention to some other potential problem may well result in a similarly declined flag.)

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Let's look at the issue of whether you could have known that nothing really went wrong, at least as far as automatic bounty awarding is concerned. (No-one can guarantee that the button to award the bounty was never clicked; Occam's razor, however, suggests that it was never clicked.) Looking at the revision history and public timeline (or hovering over pertinent parts of the posts themselves) we get the basic timeline of important events:

Bounty Started:              2014-12-28 11:15:46Z
Hans Engler's answer posted: 2015-01-03 19:58:41Z
Bounty (Grace Period) Ended: 2015-01-05 12:42:53Z
Answer Accepted:             2015-01-06 06:10:46Z

Since the answer is still scored +1/-0, a simple check of the MSE bounty faq shows that in all likelihood the criteria for automatic awarding of bounties was not met at the time the grace period ended:

What is automatic awarding?

Approximately 24 hours after the end of the bounty period, if the bounty starter has not manually awarded the bounty, the bounty may be awarded automatically.

If the bounty starter accepted an answer during the bounty period, that answer is awarded the bounty. Answers accepted before the bounty period are not eligible to be awarded the bounty automatically.

Otherwise, if there are eligible answers, the highest scoring is awarded half the bounty amount. The criteria for an answer to be eligible are:

• The answer must have been given after the bounty was started
• The answer must have a score of at least +2
• The answer must not have been written by the bounty starter

If two or more eligible answers have the same score (if their scores are tied), the oldest answer is awarded the bounty.

If neither of these conditions apply, the bounty is not awarded to any answer, and is not refunded to the bounty starter.

Answer 2

"There is a problem with this post" is not exactly a clear statement, why didn't you spell out the problem in the flag? Flags that don't actually mention what the problem is are likely to get declined if the moderators don't see anything wrong with the post.

This specific case is nothing that should be flagged, the user simply didn't choose a post for the bounty. Explaining that to the user is something you can do yourself, you don't need a mod for that. Moderators can't assign bounties, that reputation is lost in any case now. And if it was a bug, you should post a bug report on meta, and not flag.

The flag was unclear and there was no issue that required moderator attention there.