165

As Winter Bash winds down, I'm interested in hearing your feedback about the event. While I've been pretty responsible about monitoring (and responding to) questions in , I'm more interested in knowing what you all think of the event!

  • What have you enjoyed?
  • What would you like to see for next year?
  • What kept breaking for you but wasn't annoying enough for you to report?
  • Did you find all the secret hats?
  • Which was your favorite hat and why?

And other such information.

Since I'll be making a wrap-up report about the event, it would be really nice to be able to include some user testimonials!

As a reminder: hats go back in their boxes at 23:59 UTC on 4 January 2013. Be sure to collect all your hats (and screencaps of gravatars) by then!

Improve this question
29
  • 8
    Vote the question up if you like/liked Winter Bash ;)
    – Oded
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:34
  • 62
    Did you find all the secret hats? How do we know if we did? :-P
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:35
  • 22
    It was far too hard to earn the hats :)
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:37
  • 2
    notice how this question is timed to get the most attention before they steal away all of our hats.
    – Servy
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:39
  • 10
    Think about the badge for participants, or some other permanent memento.
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:40
  • 7
    I was going to vote to close this question as not constructive, but then I saw who asked it. :)
    – avpaderno
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:42
  • 13
    Wait - what's this "winterbash" you're talking about?
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 16:43
  • 13
    I know it's been asked, but I really, really wanted to wear the Abby and the Constantinopolitan at the same time. Because fezzes (and bowties) are cool.
    – Joachim Sauer
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 18:34
  • 4
    I wonder if I'm the only one who managed to get something of a permanent memento ;)
    – yannis
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 20:52
  • 9
    Next year we need resizable, manually-positioned hats! (because changing my Gravatar was too much trouble)
    – Michael Berkowski
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 21:36
  • 6
    Only complaint is that it was darn near impossible to get any attention on non-hat-related Meta questions for a good solid week.
    – Michael Berkowski
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 21:38
  • 3
    Frankly I enjoyed being able to turn it off and blocking the tag on meta. Yeah I know, I know, "bah humbug" but seriously, don't take away the ability to disable it - that allows people who want to take part to do so without annoying those of us who weren't fans. I'd agree with @meta.michael too. If someone visits a meta with a genuine problem they're not going to enjoy wading through hat talk.
    – Rob Moir
    Commented Jan 2, 2013 at 21:38
  • 8
    Didn't make much sense here in the Southern Hemisphere ;-)
    – Yaniv
    Commented Jan 3, 2013 at 0:01
  • 43
    Next year, I suggest celebrating a different shell. Maybe a winterksh or winterzsh. Or even winterposh.
    – derobert
    Commented Jan 3, 2013 at 19:57
  • 5
    Maybe consider scaling difficulty based on site traffic (like views per user, votes per question, some such thing)?
    – user206562
    Commented Jan 7, 2013 at 17:41

40 Answers 40

Reset to default
1
2
2

As much fun as making the hats more intricate or scaleable / adjustable might be, I kind of liked how awkward they looked on some avatars. I also saw lots of people change their icon to better fit some hats, so that was nice.

The one suggestion would be to be sure we are having hats for some of the new items like submitting low reputation feedback to let some of the newest members and accounts participate immediately. (Lone Ranger mask perhaps)

I'm sure you have some great data on which hats were less awarded and will shape things to have a nice mix of easy, obscure, hard and random hats to award next time excessive frivolity is called for.

Chapeau! It was a fun promotion in 2012.

Improve this answer
1

My only thought was that a hat for editing/adding tag wikis or similar would have been nice. Something that encourages the community to do some housekeeping is always useful ;)

But other than that, it was fun, are we doing an Easter one too? :)

Improve this answer
1

I had a really good laugh when I earned the policeman's hat for flagging posts. I thought it was cool, and would endorse another such event next year. :)

Improve this answer
1

I would have liked to be able to position and resize hats... I had to resize my gravitar in order to make any of the hats reasonable, and most were too large still :( I know that's a bit extensive for a small promotion, but it'd be on my wishlist for the future.

Improve this answer
1

These are the major three hats I liked the most :)

Well, I earned only six of the hats across the entire network. I think I will earn all other hats next year :)

What was most surprising is - that I won one hat for the upvote I did on 2012-12-26.

It was a lot of fun :)

Enter image description here

Improve this answer
1

Absolutely loved most of the stuff listed here - a nice mix of easy to get and hard to find, easy enough to set hats on the gravatar, generally silly good fun.

One problem - I was always curious about how I got the hat and other metrics that could be found on the hat site, but I found navigating around it very annoying. The big one was the existence of the hat description popover and how it worked in my browser. Numerous times, I ended up on the hat popover and couldn't single-click backout because the server seemed to deliver main page into popover in such a way that the popover would keep coming back when I clicked the back button a single time. This was true, I think, across IE and Netcape.

I'm an ardent back button clicker, so anything that could be done here, would be great.

Improve this answer
1

TBH I did not enjoy it very much. It wasn't particularly annoying either, I just didn't care.

What may be worth noting is that I would normally go for disabling the campaign, but I would have to check "i hate hats", but that would be a lie!

I don'have anything against hats. TBH, I don't particularly enjoy them either, I just don't care.

Improve this answer
2
  • You do remember this happened a good 6 months ago?
    – tombull89
    Commented Jul 18, 2013 at 8:02
  • @tombull89 Yes, I do...?! My memory works poor for practical things, in favor of negative things that can be acted upon. (That's why I work in QA, after all...) And I did not know about this survey until now.
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented Jul 18, 2013 at 8:09
0

Excellent event! I enjoyed it a lot.

My only suggestion (two parts): When the user earns a secret hat, (a) mention it explicitly, and then (b) have a separate section on the winter bash page for secret hats found. I didn't realize that some of the hats I had found were secret.

I would also recommend considering making the number of secret hats public, to encourage people to look for them.

Improve this answer
0

Next time I'd like to see the option to choose the size of the hat I want to wear. Each hat should have 3 different selectable sizes, this way the users would not have to change their avatar each time for them to fit. Thanks for all the fun of Winter Bash!

Improve this answer
-5

I would like the mysteries of the secret hats to be revealed now that it's over.

Improve this answer
1
2

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .