The last two years SP.SE participated in Winter Bash, which lets our users earn and wear hats on their user profile image. You earn hats through participation in asking questions, answering questions, getting up-votes, voting, commenting and sharing to mention a few things. Exactly the same things you’re doing here to earn reputation and badges. However, there is a twist; you don’t know what will earn hats. Suddenly, it just appears in a hat-gallery where you can pick the hat of the day. It’s all up to you, hat or no hat. You can chose not to wear any of earned hats. This event is a way of celebrating the many amazing people who make this site awesome.
Therefore, we’re announcing Winter Bash 2014!
Winter Bash Leaderboard
Winter Bash Hats Collection (2013)
A few of the available hats
Winter Bash Hat Example (2013)
Details
This event will run from 15 December 2014 to 4 January 2015. Users will be able to see their entire hat collection on http://winterbash2014.stackexchange.com/. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event.
Last year we had a community voting on whether or not to participate on this event. This year however, having in mind the overwhelming positive response back then, we will participate this year as well. The moderator team have already opted in for this event.
Don’t like hats?
Individual users who don’t want to participate, don’t want to see hats, and/or are generally anti-hat will have an “I hate hats” option available. In addition, just like last time, at the end of the event, all hats will go back into storage.
The only visual change to the Stack Exchange sites themselves will be the presence of the hats and the “I hate hats” button in the footer.
Rumors
We cannot confirm the rumor that there will be better version of the Twilight Sparkle hat, nor a Unicorn hat.
