Another holiday season has drawn to a close. We’ve had three glorious weeks with our beloved hats. Now as we pack away the tinsel and the party horns, it’s time to put the hats back in their boxes for another year. Before we move on to 2014 with our bare heads (and our full hearts), let’s take a few moments to reminisce.

76,586 users from all over the network earned 214,172 hats this year – that’s just about twice the number of hats they earned last year. 95 sites opted to participate in Winter Bash, which is more than the total number of sites that simply existed during last year’s event.

The most commonly earned hat was the Old Hat, earned 74,631 times (by 35,589 distinct users). The least commonly earned public hat was Oh the Horror, earned just 46 times. And the rarest hat of all was the top-secret Don Draper, earned only 14 times across the whole network.

Something new we did this year was keeping the secret hats’ triggers… well, secret. Since the community asked so nicely, it’s now time to reveal the mysteries of the secret hats! In ascending order of rarity:

• Chuck Yeager was the most commonly earned secret hat, awarded first to Óscar López - the very first user to discover a secret hat. This hat was awarded to users who answered a question within an hour of it being posted, with their answer scoring 2 or more.
• With Great Power was awarded to moderators (elected or pro tem), former moderators, and Stack Exchange employees.
• Those who earned three hats in a single day earned Johnny Three-hats for their trouble.
• The Ghost of Winter Bash Past appeared only to those who earned a Necromancer badge.
• IG-88 was a less well-known bounty hunter, and the hat that bears his name went to users who tried for a bounty, but didn’t win it.
• I’m Not Listening was awarded to users who rejected a suggested edit on their own post.
• For I See Your Point, users had to leave 5 comments on a site meta, each comment scoring 2 or more.
• Before It Was Cool was awarded to forward-thinking users who asked a question with a brand new tag (that was not deleted or removed).
• Eureka! was awarded manually by SE staff to users who correctly determined (or guessed) the trigger for any of the secret hats.
• Don Draper, in homage to everyone’s favorite smooth-talking ad man, went to users who posted a community ad that received enough upvotes to be displayed on the site (usually 6). 

And finally, we need to send a special shout-out to the top hat earner across the entire Stack Exchange network. This user earned a whopping 44 hats – all of the hats they were eligible for, missing only With Great Power due to not being a moderator. Please join me in giving the eminent Logan M a hearty round of applause!

Honorable mention is due to Manishearth, who held the network-wide lead for almost the entire duration of Winter Bash and was only edged out in the final hours by Logan M’s 44th hat. Well done to you both!

Lastly, we send our gratitude to each and every one of our users for the tireless and high-quality work you do throughout the year, even when there aren’t any hats to earn. Winter Bash is our chance to kick off our shoes and have some fun during the holiday season, and we hope you enjoyed it! The whole Stack Exchange team wishes everyone a happy and healthy 2014. That’s all, folks!

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This is a time of year of traditions and celebrations — and we have a tradition at Stack Exchange where we set this time aside each year to give back to the groups and organizations that need our help. Each year, we reach out to our moderators and offer to make a $100 donation to charity on behalf of each moderator for their Stack Exchange community. It’s just a small gesture of thanks for the tremendous amount of work every community has contributed to make this entire thing possible.

This “giving back” program actually goes waaay back to the beginning when we started with only 18 moderators and three sites. As our ranks grew, so did the donations. So on behalf of the 375 moderators this year, we have made the following donations to charity:

It is also important to remember and support the tools and organizations that make what we do possible, so we also made the following donations:

• HAProxy — $1,000.00
• jQuery Foundation — $1,000.00
• Linux Foundation — $1,000.00
• OpenSTV, the voting engine that drives our elections — $1,000.00

In addition, we continue to be a MathJax Partner with a donation of $20,000 in our commitment to helping math and science communities on the web.

As we approach 2014, I think a lot about what we have built here together. I think about the fact that this is all made possible by people who DONATE their time and GIVE freely their knowledge to benefit future readers who come here seeking help. It’s your contributions here that make all this possible. It’s what keeps the lights on and the wheels turning… and what makes this small gesture of giving back possible.

I take a lot of pride in what we do — and you should, too. This giving back program is just one of the many things we as a community do that is easy to feel pretty good about. It makes me delighted to be a part of this organization and part of a community that works so hard to help people they will probably never meet.

Take care, and see you in 2014!

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Hi folks, just a quick note here to remind y’all that the yearly Stack Overflow User Survey is live!

We’ve edited the questions/answers based on your feedback from last year’s survey and suggestions posted on Meta.

As a small token of our appreciation, we’ll be donating $1 for each completed survey to your choice of one of this year’s Stack Exchange Gives Back charities (on top of what we’re already donating on behalf of each site).

As always, we’ll be posting the results here on the blog once the survey is completed.

Take the survey!

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Ahh, the wintry season…

The gatherings of family and friends, the giving and receiving of gifts, the making and/or breaking of New Year’s resolutions – however you and yours celebrate, the end of a calendar year heralds many traditions.

Here at Stack Exchange, we wanted to get each of you an awesome, personal gift, and mail it to you as our way of saying “thanks.” But our accountant pointed out that there are 4.5 million of you, which promptly reminded us that the holidays aren’t about gifts. The real spirit of the holidays can only be captured with…

Hats!

That’s right: Winter Bash is back for another three weeks of millinery-related holiday fun.

What’s new, you ask?

New hats:  There are over 30 new hats to earn this year (with many thanks to contract designer Elias Stein). And by “hats,” we of course mean, “things you can stick on your avatar’s face.”

And it’s possible that there just might be a couple of secret ones, too. (By “it’s possible,” we mean  ”there definitely are, because we made them, like with computer code and everything, so there’s not really much doubt whatsoever.”)

Hats are transferrable: What? No, you can’t sell them to each other. Hats are transferrable across sites! You read that correctly: this year, if you earn a hat on any site, you can wear it on any participating Stack Exchange site. This was one of our most asked-for feature requests after last year’s event, and it’s a great way for everyone to highlight their achievements on their favorite site across the network.

Hat position is adjustable on your face: You remember how crushed you were after finally earning a mustache “hat,” only to discover that on your avatar, it was basically an extremely dapper unibrow? NEVER AGAIN.

You can finally reposition hats in the box until Don Draper’s suit fits as well it fits him. (I know, I know… “it’s not a suit; it’s a carousel.” Give it a rest, Don. Not everything is a carousel.)

Winter Bash 2013 will run from Monday 16 December 2013 through Friday 3 January 2014. During that time, participate on any Stack Exchange site to earn awesome hats (and other accessories!) Each hat has a different activity to trigger it. You can see all the hats and their triggers on the Winter Bash 2013 homepage. Still have questions? Of the kind that get asked… frequently?  Check out the  Winter Bash FAQ

All the hats will go back into storage at the end of Winter Bash, so get out there, earn some hats, and show them off while you can! Just be careful. We paid a deposit on them.

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The top bar of a Stack Exchange site has always been a bit of an odd place. It somehow combines user info, navigation, search, and a one-size-fits-all popup that includes hot network questions, a list of 100+ Stack Exchange sites, personal inbox messages, and other system notifications (lovingly referred to as The StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™).

It was, in retrospect, overdue for a face-lift which is why we’re excited to roll out a new top bar this week.

A Bigger, Blacker Bar

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s really black*. When we originally conceived of the top bar with the Stack Exchange logo (way back in Ye Olde 2010), one of the main goals was to mark each site as a Gen-u-wine™ Stack Exchange site. Since then, however, we’ve created unique designs for over 40 different sites, and the Stack Exchange logo has started to get a bit… lost.

So, in the redesigned top bar, we wanted to make sure that it would look the same across all sites, and make it obvious that you’re on a Stack Exchange site. It turns out that when you try to pick a color to match 40 different site designs, you quickly realize you only have one real choice: black.

^{* Jin points out that technically it’s not quite black: it’s #212121.}

New Achievements popup

The biggest addition to the top bar is the brand new Achievements popup. Previously, if you wanted to know your reputation on every site you were active on, you had to visit every one of those sites. This led to some of us, well, compulsively cycling through sites and refreshing to see if we’d gained any rep. Now, there’s one convenient place to check from whatever site you happen to be on:

This new popup includes:

• A reputation counter at the top which sums all reputation you’ve gained on all sites since the last time you checked, updated in real-time
• Entries for reputation, badge, and privilege notifications, grouped by post and time
• A summary of reputation gained today
• Aggregation from every site in the network in one place

This should make it much easier to keep track of your reputation and badges across all the sites that you are active on.

New Sites List (aka “The Site Switcher”)

The old list of sites has gotten a new layout and is now its own distinct popup. The idea is to make it easy to switch between sites if you participate on several, or to find a new site that you don’t participate on regularly:

In the new “Site Switcher” you’ll find:

• The current site at the top, with meta, chat, and blog links for the current site (and Stack Overflow Careers when on Stack Overflow)
• A list of your top 5 sites, ordered by reputation*, with your reputation for each
• A searchable list of all sites, with a short description of each

^{* We’ll probably let you customize this list in the near future, so you can include sites you like to watch but don’t have much reputation on.}

New Global Inbox

The Global Inbox has been split out into its own popup as well, instead of a subsection of the Stack Exchange popup:

We’ve gotten rid of the confusing distinction between “inbox” and “notifications”. All messages will now appear in the inbox, except for reputation and badge events which are in the new Achievements popup. Inbox items also now have a new layout, which should be easier to scan.

Feedback Welcome

There are a few smaller changes to mention as well:

• Your name has been replaced with your picture, to make it easier to recognize at a glance that you’re signed in as you (and because some longer names just don’t fit).
• The help link is now a dropdown with links to the tour and the help center, with a short explanation of what each is.
• Click areas for everything are now the full-size of the row, to make them easier to click or tap on mobile.
• The hot network questions have moved to the sidebar on the homepage, since they aren’t really navigation or notifications.

The new top bar will be rolling out network-wide, including Area 51 and stackexchange.com, in the next few weeks. As always, meta is the place to go for feedback, suggestions, and bug reports.

225 comments