Recovering bounty that was never awarded

Question

I offered a 50 point bounty on this question: Facebook and Crawl-delay in robots.txt?

As it turns out, the question was a duplicate, and the bounty was never awarded, yet i have still been deducted that 50 points...or have I missed something?

Answer 1

Here's the meta.SO FAQ on the bounty system. Relevant bit:

If no answers meet these criteria, the bounty ends without it being awarded to any answer, and is not refunded to the bounty starter.

Also, that question isn't a dupe(yet) as far as the technicalities of being closed, etc. which was actually being prevented by the bounty. Apparently mods can refund bounties, though there isn't really any detail about acceptable cases, so you'll have to talk to them about whether this fits.

Answer 2

The points are deducted when the bounty is created. Once this is done, those points are gone - you do not get them back, regardless of the outcome.