By default, this site will be opted into Winter Bash 2014. For those who are not familiar, here's a summary (courtesy of Jon Ericson):
Most of you probably remember previous years’ events, but I’ll recap anyway, for the newbies among us. Winter Bash is an annual event that can run on any Stack Exchange site that chooses to participate. Users earn “hats” for their gravatars by completing certain tasks (analogous to badges). Certain actions trigger the user receiving a hat, which their gravatar can “wear”. We track everyone’s progress earning hats in a leaderboard that looks something like this:
Winter Bash 2014 will again be available to all sites that choose to participate. We’re redesigning all the hats and adding some extra features to keep things fresh and exciting.
Some Details
This event will run from 15 December 2014 to 4 January 2015. Users will be able to see their entire hat collection on winterbash2014.stackexchange.com. That site will also have a landing page, explaining the rules and other details of the event.
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. And 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.
This is a fun event, so I personally recommend that we participate. Please chime in in the answers with your own feelings on the topic. Unless there is a strong anti-hat vibe out there in the ebook world, we will be bustin' out all sorts of weird headgear.
