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This is more of a thought experiment than anything, but what happens if a question is closed when there is an active bounty?

The "help" page on closed questions says nothing about bounties, and the "help" page on bounties says nothing about closed questions.

I believe the answer is "nothing interesting happens". Chances are - no new answers can be made, but the bounty can be awarded to any existing answers. The reason I'm asking is because this seems inherently unfair.

Consider an opinion based, but interesting question. Someone may place a bounty on the question because they want more publicity to gather more interesting answers. However, the publicity may result in such a question being closed because it goes against some official question guidelines. This seems unfair on the question-asker, as one of the motivations for placing bounties is to increase the likelihood of getting good answers, and it is unfair on people who might like to answer the question because it's closed now.

What I said can easily be refuted by saying "just don't place bounties on questions that might be closed". Either way I'm interested to know whether I'm correct in my understanding of "what will happen if a question with an active bounty is closed", or if something else happens.

Thank you!

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    $\begingroup$ Up to my knowledge. Regular user cannot close a question with bounty. To close such a question, one need to involve the moderator. Since one cannot place a bounty on a question until it is open for at least 2 days, the really bad question should have be closed before placing bounty is possible. $\endgroup$ Nov 4, 2017 at 2:52
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    $\begingroup$ There was a user that would set bounties of his questions when they started to amass closure votes to prevent the closure. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Nov 4, 2017 at 7:24
  • $\begingroup$ That's a pretty clever thing to do hahaha $\endgroup$
    – Harambe
    Nov 4, 2017 at 7:26
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    $\begingroup$ How annoyingly petty @AsafKaragila $\endgroup$ Nov 6, 2017 at 0:47

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