Keep cross-site hats

This year there were two hats, Polymath and Running Ragged, for non-trivial participation on multiple sites. A few years ago there was a hat for asking (or answering?) on a new-to-you site at some score threshold (don't remember the details). Hats like these encourage breadth, which is good -- Stack Exchange has more than 160 sites, with new ones being added all the time. It's easy to lose track of other great sites on the network, either because we didn't even know about them or because we used to participate there and gradually lost touch.

So let's keep doing something along these lines. It should be more than "show up and vote once", and it should encourage contributing to the core Q&A. I don't think a hat for, say, reviewing on three different sites would be as valuable as one for providing good questions or answers.

Flip the hats!

The hats can only be rotated or moved. But for some avatars, the hat may look better (at discretion of the hat and avatar owner) if the hat was flipped over. This would make hat wearing so much cooler and make our avatars look even cooler (no Winter pun intended).

For example, take my current hat (Like Clockwork) on my Double 0-Minion avatar. The gear is next to the eye, but my Minion would look more spy-like with the gear over the eye. Only possible with hat flipping.

Add a hat for finding duplicates

Can we have a hat that you get if you find, say 10, duplicates and the questions are successfully closed as a result of your 'possible duplicate suggestion'?

Note: this would only be awarded if you found the dupe, not if you voted to close as a dupe.

It would also be interesting to see some statistics next year relating to this hat if it was added. If it turns out that this has increased dupe finding, or made it quicker, maybe this could be considered into making a badge.

Sportsmanship Hat

I'm a big fan of the sportsmanship badge. It'd be nice to have a hat to honor those that are good sports and up vote competing answers.

Maybe something like. Up vote competing answer on five questions in which both your answer and the one up voted have a positive score.

Don't bring Archimedes back

I haven't missed the secret hat for correctly guessing a secret hat. There's still an appropriate amount of secret-hat research going on, but it's taking place in a more controlled environment and isn't generating as much angst, as far as I can tell. That's a win. Thanks!

Design request: hats, not masks

accessibility

The hats this year are really spiffy -- great job on the graphics! But the "natural size" of some of them fills most of the user image, making it hard to tell people apart graphically. These are all active users on the same site:

Yeah, they're all different because of what leaks out around the edges, but it turns out that's not enough to help me recognize individuals, particularly in chat.

The following two have been slightly enlarged by the users, but even at their natural sizes they hide a lot. I've definitely seen other cases of these two at original sizes concealing identity:

It's possible to shrink and move them so you can still see who's under there, I know, but in my experience this is uncommon:

Other hats manage to be big or "full-featured" without hiding as much, like these two:

I know that user avatars are accompanied by names and we can just read the text, but the avatars help, more than I realized. Can we design hats that let more show through while still having awesome art?

I would like to suggest

Stealing Hat

This hat would be awarded for answering a question that already has an accepted answer and having OP change the acceptance to the new answer.

Also, perhaps some other sort of bonus hat for receiving more upvotes than the original answer. Just a thought.

I'm proposing that this stealing hat be called "The Steeler" and have the logo of the American Football team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.

I thought that the "Fiery" tag was really cool this year and I just thought that it would be cool to incorporate different logos and such.

Tag: You're It

Tag wikis don't get a lot of love. Edits don't bump them anywhere, so when people do put effort into building them out it often goes unnoticed. But good tag wikis benefit a site; there's only so much you can express in the 25 characters of a tag name or even the couple hundred characters of a tag summary. The wiki itself is where you can provide more information, cross-reference related tags, link to canonical questions, and so on. Not all tag wikis call for this treatment, but I suspect most sites have a few. (Mine do.)

A hat for making a substantial edit to a tag wiki (including creating one) would remind people that this feature exists. Since wikis can't be voted on I'm not sure how to set a quality threshold; obviously we don't want it to just be based on size or people will blather in pursuit of character count. I don't have a good answer for this part.

Add hats for meta participation

We currently have what seems to be 1 hat ("I am Your Father") for meta participation. This seems really sad as this seems to encourage users to focus more about posting and other relevant actions on the main site. But meta is important to since it helps users deal with the inner problems with the site! Thus, I suggest hats for participating for meta. Two such hats would be:

• Answer three questions on meta, all accepted with positive score

• Ask three questions on meta, all with positive score

Since the activity and the importance of a post is debatable and not always represented by score, I also suggest:

• Participate in meta for five days

Add a general hat for starting (or awarding?) a bounty

We had a holiday bountapalooza on Worldbuilding as a kind of year-end celebration, and over two dozen questions received bounties totaling over 2,500 reputation points. It's not yet over, but it's been a huge success, and I think encouraging bounties would be fun and extremely productive for the site. Also, the idea of gift-giving fits in well with the various holidays that fall during Winter Bash, including Christmas and Hanukkah.

We did have a bounty-based hat this year (Philanthropist) for awarding a bounty on the last day of Winter Bash. Perhaps a more general one - or even one based on how large a bounty was placed - could attract more encouraged generosity.

Hat name suggestion: Boba Fett (in keeping with the Star Wars tradition).

Whether from a bug or not, I really liked how some of the hats were not available at the start of the WB. I'm not talking about just the "do X on the solstice" hat, or "vote on the 6th" hat.

Next year have hats without any specific date trigger, only available starting X days after the bash.

This would have a number of side effects:

• It would keep the bash lively all throughout, and everybody guessing
• It would stump secret hat guessers (me included)
• It would teach patience :)

Now without any Archimedes hat, this is a great way to have some of the secret hats, especially the easier ones.

Keep hats for reviewing old contributions.

This was one of the most beneficial features of this year's Winter Bash that old posts got some new attention: Answers, edits, resurrection of hidden gems, or closing of bad old posts long forgotten.

Community Hats!

There is only one hat for the community participating, "Just Here for the Hat". Sure, 20 unique hats is pretty difficult, but the community should also earn hats together for other actions. I mean, a community is based on its actions as a whole rather than its individual users who top the leader boards in rep and probably hats.

Some ideas would be helpful since I'm a little stuck... but I'll put some that came out of my head:

• Earn 10,000 rep cumulatively (probably secret hat)

• Create five community wiki posts that have at least seven different contributors and a positive score

• Collect all non-secret hats (definitely a secret hat)

Community driven hat designs.

We see it all the time. The SE network is community driven (not referring to the Community user).

Why not hold a contest on Graphic Design SE for users there to help create the 2017 WB hats?

There would have to be limitations and you would probably have it only for the normal (not secret) hats, but I think it would give us some fun designs.

I would like to search for users who wear a specific hat.

The reason: when I wear hats, I will consider how I wear hats. In that case, if I could search them, I could use the results as reference. I may be able to consider how to wear hats entertainingly.

Soften the "well-received" criteria to include "accepted answer"

Take for example the Lifesaver hat:

answer a question qualifying for the Tumbleweed badge that gets accepted

Many users get confused when their answer gets accepted but doesn't get the hat. It's because of another requirement that's not spelled out, that the answer must have positive score, also known more generally as the "well-received" criteria.

The well-received criteria also appeared in the Polymath hat this year, and it commonly appears in some hats every year.

It would be great if this criteria could be softened to include accepted answers with no votes (that is not the same thing as 0 score).

I would suggest

Site specific hats:

(of both secret and non secret variety (maybe two of each type?))

Stack Overflow had a site specific hat for documentation. It would be really cool if each site could have a super secret site themed hat decided upon by the moderators on that site.

For example, Math SE could have divide by zero hat, photography could have a cheese hat, etc.

There could also be a hat for getting X secret (or non secret) hats from different sites.

To those who think this is not feasible, the moderators of each site would make a secret hat and design the graphics (in SVG so that they can actually be displayed). Then the community could vote on non secret hat/hats, or the moderators could just choose those as well.

Add hats for moderation

We do have some hats for this like Abominable but there could be more. There should be hats for:

• Successfully taking down spam posts

• Having a certain number of accepted flags - may be secret due to comments

• Editing a lot of posts

This would encourage moderation within the community and with the "successful" part to discourage any random flagging, editing, or flagging for spam. Of course, Abominable should be kept since it deals with closing and deleting. And of course, over time to prevent an overload of reviews on the first day of WInterbash.

Include requirements in hat descriptions more precisely

Take for example the Lifesaver hat:

answer a question qualifying for the Tumbleweed badge that gets accepted

An important requirement was left out there, that the answer must reach a positive score, also known more generally as the "well-received" criteria. This can be easily added without making the description too long.

Another example is 011:

collect 11 hats

It wasn't clear that 11 hats must be earned on one site.

On the other hand, it's ok if the description is inaccurate when the real requirements are actually softer. For example all the date-specific hats are awarded within ±12 hours of the date itself, but nobody minds this wasn't mentioned, as receiving hats unexpectedly is always a pleasant surprise.

Add a "viral" hat

The general idea would be to create a post associated with one created by either someone with the hat or an arbitrary "starter" user(s) (this will need some thought). I was thinking these criteria:

• post is an answer to a question made by the user with the hat/starter or a question answered by someone with the hat/starter
• post reaches a score of 5 or more
• one or both posts were created during Winter Bash

This would actually encourage users to pay it forward, because the hat can be earned by answering questions, and would reward you with extra attention to your questions.

Add a hat for consistent voting

Unless I'm missing the point of one or more secret hats, it seems that this year the only hats that rewarded voting have been "Cutting the cord" and the various general participation hats (vote or post: Buche de Noel, Epiphany, I Have a Little Dreidel).

Thus I'd suggest a hat that rewards users for voting (i.e., upvotes and downvotes) throughout the winter bash. For example:

• Vote five times on posts, on each of ten distinct days
• Vote ten times on posts, on each of five distinct days

I envision these sorts of criteria encouraging a responsible voting habit, which plenty of sites would benefit from.

Time is hard, part 2

In an early Winterbash there was a hat for chatting at the turn of the year UTC, +/- something like 5-10 minutes. That left people in some time zones out, unless they got up in the middle of their night (which at least one person did), and so in future years the time ranges on time-based hats were broadened. This is why you could earn the "visit on the solstice" hat over about a 36-hour span -- when it was solstice anywhere in the world plus a buffer.

That's the background. This year when I saw "Like Clockwork" show up I thought "hey, that's a cool-looking hat that I'd like to wear". And I figured from the name that it had to do with consistent activity. There are several sites that I'm active on on a daily basis, so I figured whatever the trigger was, I would probably bump into it.

But I didn't, because the hat had a time-constrained requirement on nine consecutive days. As someone who observes Shabbat, that meant I couldn't satisfy the trigger one day a week. So that was a bummer.

Shabbat-observant users are a very small proportion of the Stack Exchange community, of course, but it would be great if all hats were theoretically available to those who want to put in the effort. If the range on this hat had been six days instead of nine days, the hat would have been harder for the Shabbat-observant to get, but not impossible. ("First Responder" was harder for many of us too because of being on Saturday; that's fine.) Or if a visit at any time in the day would have counted, then it would have been possible in most -- but not all -- time zones. (It's possible to earn Fanatic on Mi Yodeya without violating Jewish law, but you have to choose your dates carefully.)

Again, I recognize that this is a specialized constraint, and -- dare I say it -- it's only a hat. But I humbly request that, for hats that require participation on Saturdays, we try to be flexible.

Hats for review tasks

• Awarded when a user successfully passes a review audit.

or

• Awarded when a user completes a task (or a certain amount of tasks) in one of the review queues (and picked the same action as the community consensus).

If that would cause users to robo-review, I'd suggest to make it a secret hat.

Win a hat for having at least X hats on 3 different stack exchange sites

This could be a secret hat, in which case X should be lower - perhaps 5 hats on 3 different sites.

Or it could be a normal hat, in which case X should be higher - perhaps 10 or even 20 hats on 3 different sites (looking at my top 3 hat sites, I have 32/16/16 hats, so I would have made additional effort on two of those sites if we had such a hat with X = 20).

Most users get most of their hats on their single favorite site. This would encourage users to participate and gain hats on multiple sites.

I'm not sure whether it should be the same X hats on each of the 3 sites, or different hats on different sites.

Allow us to wear multiple hats

I want to create hat mashups

Make it possible to distinguish hats earned on current site

This was requested in many previous years too.

Keep site-specific hats but don’t ‘punish’ users not on Stack Overflow

I really liked the idea of having hats that were awarded for participation across non-SO sites. I also thought ‘wow, What’s up, Doc? looks like a cool hat’ before I realised it was SO only and I wasn’t able to get it. Why? I’m not anywhere near a programming expert wouldn’t want to attempt to look through sites and sites worth of Documentation just to find typos that I can fix by suggesting edits. If I visit SO, it’s to search for answers and upvote what I found helpful. I’m sure I’m not alone.

That of course means that me not actively participating on SO (for a good reason) implicitly punished me in the overall network-wide hat leaderboard. My maximum possible hat count would have been 39 rather than 41.

Instead, I suggest tying each SO-specific hat to a non-SO-specific hat and counting them as 1 achieved hat. This is already the case for all the other hats: even if you win them on all sites you frequent it will only count once for the leaderboard. Why should the SO-specific hats (and their non-SO counterparts) be any different?

Eatable hats

We had cupcakes in past and now taco, but why not some fruits as hat next year like pineapple hat or fruit basket/salad, or my own favorite Kiwi hat.

They can be triggered for helping new users, like editing their posts or upvoting them.

When choosing hat to wear, let us choose on which sites to wear it, instead of just choosing between current site and all sites.

Change the colors!

Hats are usually distinguishable by their shapes only, without the need of colors due to their... well... distinctive shapes.

Take my current hat, "Like Clockwork", as an example. You know that it's "Like Clockwork" (or at least not any other hat) due to its simple shape and the clock gear. For my profile, black is suitable but I prefer blue! Changing the color to blue or any basic colors (red, green, yellow, white, etc.) shouldn't be that hard and would add a much more fun spectrum (sorry for the science pun) to hats!

To clarify, let us change the color of the the hat manually.