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We've had a few s recently (thanks!), and the pattern is generally that when there's more interest than grants the highest rep users get the goods.

This absolutely makes sense, rewarding those people that are contributing to the site. However, it does bias the grants towards those of us that have been participating for the longest time.

My suggestion is that some of the grants (assuming there are more; please!) get broken up into two groups: highest-rep (like in the past) and highest-rep-recently (e.g. highest this month or highest this quarter).

This still rewards contributing to the site, but opens it up to someone that's new here. You'd still have to do a reasonable amount of work to get to the top of the monthly (or especially quarterly) rankings, and those users with a big backlog of answers do have an advantage, since old questions/answers do continually pull in a trickle of rep.

(Perhaps there could even be the odd grant rewarding something else? e.g. number of edits, or number of accepted answers regardless of rep? (e.g. doesn't pull in much rep)).

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  • 1
    FWIW, the "birthday contests" that some SE sites have had have had similar categories.
    – Tony Meyer
    Nov 11, 2011 at 8:47
  • 1
    I like the idea of swag being given to 'highest rep this month', 'highest rep this quarter' and 'highest rep this year'.
    – Valorum
    Sep 25, 2014 at 19:42
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    As a 'relatively new' user with high-ish rep, I am intrigued by this thing I've never heard of before.
    – Zibbobz
    Sep 26, 2014 at 20:39
  • @gilles - Do you think editing the tags will get me some swag or was it simply a cosmetic change you were looking to make :-)
    – Valorum
    May 20, 2015 at 20:36
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    @Richard I just thought we should have a tag swag when I happened on meta.scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3514/…, and looked for applicable questions. It isn't exactly the same thing as promotional-grant.
    – user56
    May 20, 2015 at 20:43

3 Answers 3

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From the latest swag-for-posts run, (that being Harry Potter), the highest rep users who have also been a part of other rounds are placed in a "maybe" state to allow newer users to come up and put their hands forth.

Should none do so, then you see the same high rep users picking up the grabs.

Given the user pool so far, it looks like it may work out okay right now for new users to be able to participate fresh off the boat.

You'll eventually cycle through all the users as any potential booty comes round.

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  • ISTM that goes too far the other direction. There's a reason @Jeff has 17k rep - we don't want to limit him to only ever getting a single grant, when we could be helping him contribute even more great content. IMO a mix of old & new would work well.
    – Tony Meyer
    Nov 11, 2011 at 8:49
  • 3
    You like me, you really like me :)
    – Jeff
    Nov 11, 2011 at 18:29
3

The way the gaming site has handled this is quite interesting, and I suspect that we might want to do this at some point as well.

  1. Any user requesting a grant must have a minimum reputation, namely 500. This ensures that the person is somewhat dedicated to the site.
  2. If you won a game recently, you are not eligible for the current round.
  3. The winners are chosen pseudo-randomly (Not sure what that means...).

However, I haven't seen yet how this is really an issue. We have been generally giving away far fewer items than were requested, with the exception of Harry Potter. So, even though they limit it to the highest reputation users, practically it's limited only to the people who sign up.

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    +1 for your last point. This cannot possibly be an issue yet because we've never had more people apply than there is swag available, so everyone who's applied has gotten items so far. I think the bigger issue is that more new users aren't over on meta, so they're not even seeing the grants.
    – user1027
    Nov 11, 2011 at 15:12
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    It's funny, I tried to get people to join this site, answer a few questions to be able to post on meta, and get themselves a free Star Wars on blu-ray, didn't work. Sigh. Still, the HP looks to be the first to have more people applying than available movies, so we're getting closer...
    – PearsonArtPhoto
    Nov 12, 2011 at 5:19
  • I believe the pseudo-randomness refers to the clauses in the initial rework post on Gaming: in addition to excluding most recent winners, previous winners who don't post enough content could also be excluded.
    – Dave DuPlantis
    Nov 14, 2011 at 20:28
-3

After some consideration, I've decided that this is an excellent idea.

I think that we can all agree that site swag (specifically pens, mousemats, coasters and gold bullion) should be awarded to the user who 'wins' the following criteria:

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    Basically, all to you?
    – Jack B Nimble
    Sep 25, 2014 at 20:07
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    @JackBNimble - Really? I hadn't noticed. How about that.
    – Valorum
    Sep 25, 2014 at 20:08
  • I'd also accept a cheque
    – Valorum
    Sep 25, 2014 at 20:08
  • ROFL. Subtle of you ;-)
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    Jan 13, 2016 at 17:17
  • @randal'thor - Given the number of downvotes, perhaps I could have been ever so slightly more subtle.
    – Valorum
    Jan 13, 2016 at 17:56

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