Offering a Bounty for a long unanswered question; is it good practice?

Question

Thank ye all for your patience and understanding in advance. Posted a Code Review question 4 years ago and it has never received an answer review, so thinking about offering a bounty for it. Is this okay? Thank you.

Answer 1

Is this okay? Frowned upon?

There are many reasons why you'd want to bounty a question and most of them are okay. The only questions not okay to bounty are the kind of questions that aren't okay on the site (e.g. off-topic or spam).

However...

A bounty itself may not accomplish what you want. A bounty can be useful when you have a good, interesting question that simply went 'under the radar', it wasn't picked up on. And even then, especially with some of the more complicated programs, it can take a couple of rounds of bountying before it gets picked up.

If a question is not answered within 2 months, there is a good chance the question wasn't interesting or could've been better. Better questions have a higher chance of attracting (better) answers. So what makes a good question? We have a FAQ on that: How to get the best value out of Code Review - Asking Questions.

See if you can improve the questions first, put a bounty on it afterwards.

More specifically, you seem to have 2 unanswered questions from roughly that time period:

• Python palindrome function; is it possible to write it without using string conversion?
• Max Heap Data Structure Implemented with Python List

At this point, neither of them are particularly interesting. Heaps and palindromes are usually done as a training exercise, have been done about as much as FizzBuzz and I'd hope the level you are at now is not the same as the level you used to be at.

Palindromes in Python can be done hundreds of way, the most straight-forward way being slicing. Python also has a reverse function. You could even abuse recursion. The fastest way is probably string indexing with slicing, but you state you want a purely mathematical way using string conversion. Which is possible, but I wouldn't know why you'd want to do that on text for such a simple operation.

Then again, none of the above really matters. That particular question was written for Python 2.7.12. I know the problem, I've been stuck on Python 2.x for work-related reasons till early '18 myself. But that's 4 years ago. Back in the day, plenty of people were stuck (for a lot longer than we thought we'd be) but that's no longer an excuse today. All the code I'm still interested in either has been ported to Python 3 or will be ported on first use. At this point in time, the only reliable way (in my opinion) to salvage that is if you add a note reviews do not have to be limited to Python 2.

Your Heap question can probably be salvaged if you tell us more about what you're looking for. Heaps have been done, what is the reason you're not using a mature library like heapq? Of the 13 heap python-3.x questions we currently have, only 6 are answered. If you want yours to be answered, make sure it stands out.

Note: For anecdotes on the value of bounties, see Bounties do not seem to achieve the desired effect. It's not a current list, but an interesting read to look at what else is important to get the most out of a bounty.

Answer 2

If you want a review, and the question hasn't had enough attention (both of these seem to be true, given your question here), then adding a bounty is exactly the right way to draw attention to it.

Other things you might be able to do to help reviewers:

• Ensure you have a clear problem statement, so that it's easy to understand exactly what the code is supposed to do.
• Ensure the code is complete and provide any necessary inputs, so that reviewers can build and run it.
• Provide unit tests so functions can be experimented with individually.
• Make sure your code is as clear as you can possibly make it.

Before you post your bonus, I recommend that you review your code yourself and make any improvements or updates that you can think of, and edit those into the question. You won't be allowed to do that once you receive an answer, so now is your chance to apply the things you've learnt in the last few years, and have reviewers concentrate on things you didn't see for yourself.