What should we do for Winter Bash 2016? [closed]

Question

^{This is in the same vein as Winter Bash closing remarks - ideas for next year as What should we consider for next year's Winter Bash?. I figured we might as well have one for this year. . .}

So, Winter Bash 2015 is over. The hats have been put back into storage, the snowflakes are gone, and the tiny people have stopped throwing snowballs at each other (or maybe not).

What worked this year, and what should we consider for Winter Bash 2016 (I assume there will be one)? More hats? Less hats? New ideas?

I think going for the one-idea-per-answer format, as in the past, should work. Also, the consensus by the answers posted so far seems to be to add a basic description using a # before the text, appearing like

Summary of my hat comment/request

Details of my hat comment/request

Answer 1

Make hats encourage good/desired behaviour.

• Hairboat's Revenge, for instance, is just silly: it caused a lot of unnecessary comments and clutter. Suggestion for next year: abolish it. If the CMs want to play Christmas pranks on each other, can't they do it without causing a lot of mess for everyone?
• Timey Wimey might have seemed like a good idea, but in practice it encouraged people to do lots of insignificant edits and clutter up the front page with old questions just to get a hat. Suggestion for next year: require edits to be substantial (by some definition).
• Greeter also probably seemed like a good idea, but it caused some problems on sites with a high volume of low-quality posts.

(Admittedly Winter Bash 2015 was much better on this front than Winter Bash 2014. Kudos to Pops and whoever else was involved!)

Answer 2

Secret hats were a win

I liked that not all the secret hats were spoiled on day 2 or even known about for several days. Two secret hats (at least) weren't eligible to be awarded until several days after Winterbash had started, which made for a nice surprise.

I don't know if all the secret hats were guessed, but if they were it wasn't obvious. There are still a few, including one that I earned, that I don't know the exact prompt for. (I know I'm "very close" on the one I earned, but I didn't guess it.) I'm looking forward to seeing the revelations there. I'm glad I had the chance to experiment with and try to figure out secret hats for the entirety of Winterbash.

Answer 3

Encourage participation on meta

Most users never venture onto per-site metas. This year there was a secret had that had to do with posting (once) on meta, and there was a non-secret hat that was earned by voting once on a specific day. I'd like to see a non-secret hat (so it's a more-obvious prompt) that encourages more meaningful meta participation -- not just a single post or vote, but something that encourages activity over several days like some of the hats this year did. I'm not sure what the exact criteria should be -- maybe something like voting or posting on meta on five different days, or earning a Nice (Question/Answer) on meta? (Voting can be abused, so maybe not just voting.)

The clue I want to plant is: stuff happens on meta that affects you; please participate there at least occasionally.

Answer 4

Avoid hats that require receiving downvotes

Sun Wukong, everyone's favourite monkey, required getting 5 downvotes on a Meta post.

I saw all kinds of crap last five minutes before being deleted, and still garnered the requirements.

Hats that require receiving downvotes should be avoided at all costs; we don't want spammy posts at all, not on Meta, not on Main (which is the same thing here), not anywhere.

Answer 5

Allow users to see which users have a certain hat

For example, is there an easy way to determine how many have gotten the Auld Lang Syne hat or who got it first?

Answer 6

Allow some hats to be combined

I kinda disliked the fact that you could only wear one hat, regardless of what that hat was. It would be nice if hats were given some sort of "equip region" like the way Team Fortress 2 does: that way, you could wear glasses and a jacket together but not two jackets.

Answer 7

• The secret hats question: Winter Bash 2015 hats
• The chat-room: David's Hat Store

Remove the discovery hat (Archimedes / Eureka)

Three reasons:

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1. Disadvantaging other users

Before @TheGuyWithTheTux posted the Community Wiki answer, the secret hats question was a free-for-all with five of the same answer all voted up to +40.

I found that every hour or so, someone would comment on one of my posts saying they've figured it out!, where they would guess an old theory.

I didn't have any problem linking old chat messages that disprove their theories, but it was exactly that.

They weren't in the chat.

We were creating a closed off environment that wasn't easy nor impossible to get to, where we internally shared progress.

Most of the people who were 'regulars' in that chatroom ended up with Archimedes hats.

Those people who weren't present weren't being disadvantaged necessarily, but at the same time, it wasn't exactly fair hunting ground.

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2. Pops is not Big Brother

Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation gives me over 1000 chat rooms (granted more than a few frozen or dead).

How is the Stack Exchange team (Pops) supposed to monitor 1000 chat rooms for scattered discussion and guesses?

And no, 64kb of Regex is not the correct answer to this rhetoric question.

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3. There's no way to tell who has what and for what.

Some people got Archimedes in chat, and subsequently announced what the trigger was.

Other people got Archimedes, waited a while to see if people would additionally guess it, and release it later (Like I did with It's Over 9000)

Some people got it, and just never told us (until T-minus 10 minutes)

Additionally they had to be edited into the answer, which people were reluctant to do.

The answer was the closest people had to a central hat information port, without joining and lurking chat.

The people who received Archimedes weren't linked either, so people didn't know whether it was really close (like Cleanup Crew for most of WB), or already solved.

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Counter-reasons:

1. Reasons to solve Secret Hat triggers declines:

1. No way to effectively verify correct solutions (besides Pops saying yes)
2. Less reason to solve them; hats go unsolved

2. One less hat

Answer 8

Keep the good pacing of easy hats

Some hats were easy to earn; some were hard. One thing I particularly noticed this year is that easy hats could be earned every few days. WinterBash started with a hat (Sufganiyot) for participation (vote or post), and a few days later there was the Star Wars hat that was similarly easy, and a few days after that was the secret Flip Flop, followed a day or two later by the one for voting on meta, followed by the one for doing something on Dec 25, and finishing up with the one for chat participation near the turn of the year (UTC). If you started at the beginning you could also earn the search hat on day 3 and the fanatic hat on day 10. Meanwhile, there were harder hats to earn and secrets to discover.

My gut feeling (read: I have no data) is that this kind of pacing can help draw in casual hatters, the people who aren't going to invest a lot of energy into hunting hats but who can nonetheless get some new headgear every few days without too much effort and thus stay engaged with the game. That seems like it would be more fun than having all the hats available at the beginning, spending a couple days trying to earn them, and then losing interest. It was for me.

Answer 9

A hat for contributing / improving tag wikis

I'm thinking here of tags that existed prior to WinterBash, and that have poor wikis and/or wiki excerpts.

• It would be easier to do this for tags without any wiki of course.
• Tags should have some significant number of questions. What that means may be site-specific, but 10+ seems reasonable.

Answer 10

Let me see which hats I've earned on a given site

I made this request last year too. I'd like to be able to see all the hats I've earned on a particular site. I can see the first nine in the leaderboard, or all of them by stepping through the hats one at a time, but neither of those is ideal. Maybe, on the profile hats page (darn, didn't take a screen shot of that to mark up), the background color on locally-earned hats could be changed to the light yellow that's used for new entries in your profile reputation, activity, and favorites tabs? Or maybe the leaderboard could support a "more" link for each entry hat would show all the hats for that site? (As a user I'd prefer the former as it doesn't make me go somewhere else to get the information when I'm already on a site.)

Answer 11

Try to have fewer hats that are only available on large sites.

• Timey Wimey could only be earned on sites at least a year old
• Odinson could only be earned on sites with at least one gold tag badge holder
• Amazing Grace could only be earned on sites with a fairly active meta site (no hope of getting it on SciFi, for instance, even though that's a fairly big site).

Answer 12

Better organization of secret hat discussion

Something like have a CW question with one answer for each hat (where all discussion of that hat could take place) and one accepted answer that contains no speculation (i.e. it would be a list of only the hats that Eureka/Archimedes have been awarded for).

That way:

• There can still be discussion of hats in comments (which wouldn't be possible with a single answer).
• There wouldn't be multiple answers for one hat (which has happened in the past from multiple users posting the same thing for reputation).
• There's a list of exactly how to get the known hats (which didn't happen in the past due to speculation everywhere).

Answer 13

More hats for reviewing in the other review queues moderation hats

Thalia and Melpomene helped to some extent when it came to reviewing (as did at least one secret hat), but Winterbash hats largely neglected the First Posts, Late Answers, Suggested Edits, and Low Quality Posts queues. It would be nice if there were more hats promoting reviewing, and in different ways.

Robo-reviewing would have to be stopped, though, in some way. That's trickier.

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It might also be good to add hats for flagging (may not happen) and related activities. There was a secret hat for comment cleanup, but that was only for a user's own comments.

Answer 14

A hat to encourage renewing old affiliations

I think it would be cool to earn a hat for posting on a site (or maybe Meta site) that a user has an account on, but has not visited in over a year (or something). This would encourage users to participate in a wider variety of SE communities that they theoretically had some kind of association with.

Answer 15

Special hats for promoting/participating in a Beta site

I'm running on the theme of encouraging users to diversify their community affiliations/interactions, in this case by supporting our Beta sites in ways that will help them grow.

Answer 16

Hat Rareness Display

I've encountered this situation during this year's bash. For whatever reason, I've got a hat called "It's Over 9000!" and the hat you get when you earn a gold badge (sorry I forgot what it's called). The "It's over 9000!" hat is a secret hat, and I don't know which hat I should wear, since the both of the hats seem like a good choice to me. Without giving the secrets of the secret hats away, I think there should be a "This hat is common", "This hat is rare", "This hat is epic", and "This hat is legendary" so that it would be an obvious choice to the user when deciding which secret hat to show off. Another solution would to add a "This hat is owned by #% of the community" or something on the like.

Edit: I just found that only 48 people were awarded "It's Over 9000!". Without the correct information, I made the incorrect decision of wearing the golden hat instead of "It's Over 9000!".

Answer 17

Hat Styles

What if someone wants to wear a hat, but cannot because it matches too closely their avatar? They either have to change their avatar or not wear the hat, if they wish for the hat to be visible. Therefore, hats (at least common ones) should come in styles/variants, largely a light contrast and dark contrast version. This can be compared to the Flip Flop hat, except either is available to the user upon receiving the hat.

Answer 18

Hat for earning a new badge

I would like to see a hat awarded for earning a badge that you've never earned before (i.e. not a 10th "nice question" badge). That would encourage a user to diversify their activity and/or the number of sites they post on.

Answer 19

More Chat hats:

Some users seem almost scared of chat.

Perhaps we could encourage people to participate more in chat by including chat hats.

Of course this brings the 'chat spam' worries with it, but I'm sure the talented Stack Exchange team can make good chat hats.

Answer 20

Site specific additional hats

Make some hats which are site specific like some movie related hat for Movies & TV or Scifi.SE, game related for Arqade etc etc.

This will encourage cross site traffic too and will let people understand their neighboring SE sites.

Answer 21

Again, All hats to be obtainable on all sites and all users

I said this last year

The hairboat hat on the other hand was obtained by posting a comment to a particular user and while this user is on Anime and Manga, they have no activity which mean the hat associated with commenting to them is unobtainable on Anime and Manga.

This Year one of the Secret Hats was Hairboat's Revenge and just like last year my goal was to get all the hats on Anime and Manga and once again this hairboat hat was impossible to get because said user's only comment is on the Meta

Also the Explorer Hat is only obtainable for new users and nothing ruins a collection than someone pointing out one item set up in a way that it can never be yours.

My Suggestion is

• Dump these kind of hats or
• Keep these kind of hats but
  • Give some sort of compensation to users where it is impossible to get the hat (ie. after getting maybe 20 hats they are automatically awarded impossible hats) or
  • have an alternate condition, ie for Explorer "OR your very first post retains a score of 3 or more 3 days after it was edited during Winterbash"

Answer 22

Trophy/unique/rare/idk hats that are not counted on leaderboards

These would be hats that can be earned, but do not count towards a user's standings in the leaderboards. The hats would be for things that aren't exactly fair (e.g. for some users they can be earned easily but for others it it difficult or impossible, or earning the hat depends very largely on circumstances outside your control).

This would make problematic hats possible/not-controversial:

• Site-specific hats
• Eureka/Archimedes
• With Great Power (A secret hat from a few years ago, automatically earned if you are a moderator, unobtainable otherwise)
• Something like "Be at the top of a site's leaderboard."

Answer 23

More visible Logo

On chrome on Windows 8.1 computer and on chrome on Mac OS X El Capitan with default chrome settings, the snowflake logo is barely visible when the tab and window is not active.

The light blue on the grey background can barely be seen. I think the common method to solve this kind of bad visibility due to differing background colors problem is to outline the logo using a completely different color.

Answer 24

Let's create a christmas tree!

We can collect for the christmas tree and that decorations will appear at winterbash2016.stackexchange.com (there should be a big christmas tree).

Sample: If someone collect a new decoration it will appear on the big christmas tree and when he collect all toys he will get a star at top of the tree.

To get decorations you should:
1. voteup to get green decorations.
2. votedown to get red decorations.
3. star to get a stars.
4. answer to get green present.
5. edit to get yellow present.
6. participate in deleting question to get a red present.
7. ask something to get blue present.
8. answer correctly to get a toy. (reindeer, santa, Teddy bear, Elf, sledge)

All decorations will be available to add them to your profile image.
It will be completely optional.

Let's create a christmas tree together!

Answer 25

Let us suggest the hats for next year

We should have another thread where we can suggest the hats for next year, especially the secret ones*. Until then, here are some of my suggestions:

• A non-random Flip-Flop hat - Those in the northern hemisphere get the blue hat (longest night), and those in the southern hemisphere get the golden hat (longest day).
• Short and sweet - For writing a post and then receiving a comment on it that is even longer than the post itself.
• Centurion - For earning hats on 100 different sites.
• Columbus - For being the first user to earn a particular hat on a site.
• Where are the five vowels? - Any user who does not have a consonant in their user name but earns 5 hats.
• The play without an A - A user who makes a post that has atleast 5 upvotes (to prevent spam) but there is not a single a in the post.
• Couch potato - For spending over 10 hours (in total) in chat.
• Dedicated - For earning 15 hats on one site, and not having more than 5 hats on any other site.

Of course, you people can come up with even better suggestions.

*I know some may feel it is a bad idea to ask for secret hat suggestions from the public, but I feel it could work since there will be hundreds of suggestions made. And you could always modify the suggestions slightly before using them. People will anyway scan the list for something that matches and it could be fun.

Answer 26

Allow us to wear previous year(s) earned hats (but not earn ones we missed)

Assuming you've kept the records of who earned what since Winterbash's inception, an ability to equip an old favourite would be pretty fun.

Combined with quartata's suggestion of equipping multiple items, this could make for some interesting combinations.

Answer 27

A hat for putting things in their places

It would be interesting to have a secret hat for migrating a question that receives more upvotes after migration and possibly that causes new account associations to be created (new user on the site, but not new to SE). For added difficulty and to reduce intentional garbage, the question has to hit the HNQ/Multicollider post-migration. How's that for difficulty? This hat encourages users to find other communities that they might like.