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Glare Reducers seem to be gifted to non-active members of the Stack Overflows, despite the fact they have not logged in during the duration of Hat Bash. Example and links below:

Over a year inactive

This member has not logged in in more than a year... yet has the Glare Reducers. Also see here, here, and here.

This skews the data into making it seem that the Stack Overflows have had more hats than any other sites despite the fact that the majority of these users have not participated in winter bash. Is this the intended purpose of Glare Reducers or should they only be awarded to members who actively participate on the network during Winter Bash? Thanks.

Edit: For more context, over 600,000 free hats have been awarded in this way on English Stack Overflow alone. (Between the other Stack Overflow sites in other languages, an additional 30,000 to 40,000 hats have been awarded.)

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    I'm not sure 'practically' that the network wide leaderboards are meant as much more than a little bit of fun. That said the equitable solution might be dark themes for all :D
    – Journeyman Geek
    Dec 19, 2021 at 2:25
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    @JourneymanGeek I know that the leaderboards (especially at the one-hat level) are not that important, but it just seemed really off, so I was curious if it was [status-by-design] or an unintended consequence of a block of coding that states that all users that have tried the dark mode get the hat.
    – Joe Kerr
    Dec 19, 2021 at 2:28
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    "This skews the data into making it seem that the Stack Overflows have had more hats than any other sites despite the fact that the majority of these users have not participated in winter bash." Yeah, participation trophies only awarded on one (ok 5) sites aren't fun.
    – Peilonrayz
    Dec 20, 2021 at 15:32

1 Answer 1

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+100

Yes, they are intentionally being awarded to inactive members.

Unlike many other user preferences and account settings, we dont track the date on which a user toggles dark mode on or off. Also - it is stored on a network account level (and not on a per-site level). The result of this is that the query for awarding the hat just looks at (for each site with dark mode on): who has a user account on this site and has dark mode on for their network account.

Same implementation as last year, not going to change it now for this year.

That said, I hear the feedback. In the future, for a similar scenario, I think that we would try to connect the award based on the user having some other base activity or active presence on the site and/or some WB activity (like getting any other hat).

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