Allow players to in some way sponsor a bounty through a Marshall. Or, rather than using a Marshall, add an NPC at a Corvus station that could process player-sponsored bounties (perhaps after their Corvus standing is high enough).

Since being a bounty hunter and killing a bounty usually imparts some level of faction standing protection, also make it so that only NPC-sponsored bounties give faction protection.

Just do bounties by vote. Each Marshall takes votes from members of his faction and assigns bounties based on popularity. So a serco can submit a name to this serco Marshall and a bounty is given when you kill that person based upon how many people voted for that person. Vice versa for the other races.

The whole system needs a complete overhaul. Semi-measures aren't good enough and will only lead to half-assed implementations like the one that exists right now.

adding a NPC Marshall to Odia M14 is a cool idea. it could work with an easy command such as /msg "Corvus Marshall" place bounty "player name" "amount of money". the money is then deducted and given to whoever manages to score a PK against the individual.
who's on the bounty list could be checked via an info-Mission on Odia M14.

+1 to OP vrzzzt

+1 OP. I say do it through Corvus.

When the bounty has been claimed, anybody who contributed funds toward it should be notified so that they can gloat or whatever. Also, just for fun, the bounty-accepting NPC should announce on sector-chat that the bounty was claimed.

There should probably be some kind of sorting system in the bounty listing so that it prioritizes people who have not only logged in recently, but flown through space as well. Otherwise station-camping bots like IRC_ that never leave the station would end up cluttering the top of the bounty list as their bounties gradually rise forever (unless their owners decide to periodically undock and let their friends kill the bot or something). And to be clear, I don't have a problem with bots having perpetual bounties or anything; I just don't want them cluttering up the top of the list, which should be occupied by real players.

Rin, part of the solution would be simply to allow the sponsors of the bounties to remove them themselves. However, I should hope that players in the first place wouldn't be trying to put bounties on 'players' which aren't likely to be put in a position to be killed.

I do though think that we should be able to bid on most anything. Doing so would eventually lead to a rudimentary faction based 'stock market'.

Excluding "station-camping" bots like IRC_ wouldn't do anything for you. It rarely docks, and honestly it would make for an interesting bounty target. People have found it and killed it before. :)

It would be nice to have the current bounty list sorted by age. There's still a bunch of stuff on there from years past like Pirren and Ecka's Ancient Cat that will basically never be claimed.