Change views items per page dynamically (which had a bounty) has been merged with How do I limit the number of Views results on specific pages?
What happens to the bounty in these cases? To my mind it should be refunded to the user who originally set the bounty, as it's not their fault that the questions have been merged.
This doesn't seem to be the case though so I'm left wondering: Is the loss of the reputation a 'punishment' for having asked the duplicate question in the first place, or am I jumping the gun, and will the reputation eventually be returned to that user?
I know that the ethos with bounties is that once you've declared a bounty you've lost the points, but I also know that in edge cases moderators will intervene and re-award the points.
Also, there are dozens of other questions on the site that are duplicates and should be merged, but aren't. I'm wondering why this specific question was singled out as one that should be merged, rather than left as a "signpost" to the canonical version of the question (which is what happens 99% of the time on other SE sites)? Is this simply because it was in the bounty list and therefore had higher visibility?
For the record, the action taken by the mod was definitely the correct one (the bountied question had been asked nearly a month after the original and was indeed an exact duplicate), I'm just wondering what happens to the bounty points, and why this question was singled out for merging?
p.s. if these should be two separate questions let me know and I'll split them up.
