DIY Birthday Celebration?

Question

Did you know DIY’s birthday is coming up on March 3rd? YAY! Congratulations!

How about a contest or some other fun activity to stir things up a little? After a year of great Q&A, we'd like the opportunity to "give back" for everyone's hard work.

Anniversary events area a great way to spark some interest in the extracurricular activity in your site...and maybe even more meta participation! :P

An “anniversary event" can be just about anything. Take a look at Super User’s 2nd Birthday Super Contest for inspiration, or at Unix's currently-running contest. This event doesn’t have to be a contest. Dream up whatever you feel the community will find interesting, and go for it.

Start a meta post or chat event to work out the details. Rally support for your event and bring it to our attention ([email protected]). We're really interested in community-lead initiatives, so let’s just say, if you can work out the details, we’re very motivated to say “go for it!”

Let's make Captain Construction proud to be one of us:

Answer 1

• Along the Q&A side, I feel like we consistently get pretty great answers to most questions, so I'm not sure there's much we need to reward there. Still an answer contest fits well, so a prize for either highest upvoted answer or some sort of averaging/top 5 type metric.

• Our unanswered questions count could use a little work (117 at the moment). Prize for highest upvoted Necromancer type answer?

• I haven't seen a great question in awhile, so I'd suggest a prize for highest upvoted new question. Maybe a separate one for a new user too.

• Is there a category of question we could promote like Gaming and SciFi do?

• Outside of Q&A I'd like to see some more project updates. A big prize for best project (idea/execution/etc) would be great. It would almost have to be put on meta for voting purposes.

• My opinion is obviously colored, but I'd like to offer a prize for best new blog entry as well.

I also like a lot of SU's #2 birthday suggestions, I just don't know if we have enough users for that many prizes :)

Answer 2

We are currently at 3,704 3,718 questions:

https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions

We're currently averaging just over 6 questions a day. At this rate it would be 300 / 6 = 50 days before we get to 4,000 questions - so a prize for asking the 4,000th question would probably not be sensible given the time frame of the contest.

Another reason it wouldn't be sensible would be that it could encourage people to ask trivial or off topic questions in order to get there.

However, is there any other metric we could use?

Answer 3

• Tags could use wikis. Though, this might overwhelm mods and +10K users.

• Might be nice to see more users with the Civic Duty badge. This might overwhelm the spam-vote scripts, and cause crazy rep boomeranging.

• Meta could use more traffic. Not sure how to track meta participation though.

Answer 4

The lack of traffic on the meta page is what amazes me. Maybe we could have a DIY Site Tip and offer tips on making questions better, how to look at the suggested box when asking questions, choosing correct tags, adding pictures, adding links, adding pictures if you are new to the site and other things that can be found in the faq or we can dream up. Maybe rotate something on the side that can attract someone to click on it. I don't know if we can 'pin' a site tip question to be the first question but if we could... It might be too late to tie in to March 3rd but maybe we could do it this month as part of of the celebration.