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This has been shipped today (August 2nd)! Enjoy your swag, everyone :)

If you still don't have yours and think you should have it by now, please send me an e-mail so I can look into it instead of leaving a comment here. :)

We want to congratulate and thank everyone that helped this site and community grow healthily into what they are today!

To make this announcement even more festive, I tried to find some good biology jokes, but was only able to find this one humerus, and I'm not sure that qualifies as a biology joke... (｡ˇ艸ˇ)

If you can find your name among the top 72 users in the first two pages here, we have a surprise for you! We want to send you a token of our appreciation for being among the most prolific users in this community! As such, we're sending you a little box, inside which you'll find:

A T-SHIRT!

T-SHIRTS!!!!!!!

STICKER PACK!

STICKERS!!!!!!!

I'll be reaching out to you later today with a link to a form: be sure to fill out the form as soon as you're able to do so! You'll have two weeks to do it, after which I'll close the form and take care of sending all of the swag your way! It should take from 6 to 8 weeks for the package to be delivered to you!

If you're not on the list, don't worry too much about it — we've got some extra swag stored we can send to you for events and such!

Thanks to all of you for making this site great!

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    $\begingroup$ I had absolutely no idea I was #15 on that list - I just got my email. Wahoo! Finally, fake internet points are good for something! $\endgroup$
    – MattDMo
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 14:04
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    $\begingroup$ This is great but I wanted a beaker shaped beer mug like the ones chem guys got :( T-shirt is cool too :) $\endgroup$
    – WYSIWYG Mod
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 14:42
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    $\begingroup$ @WYSIWYG Perhaps those plushy microbes would have been fun! But I'm very happy with a T-shirt! What a lovely token :D $\endgroup$
    – James
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 16:04
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    $\begingroup$ Really nice gesture! However, isn't there a webaddress on either the tshirt or the stickers? If the purpose is publicity it seems kind of weird not to include an address (or even a name). $\endgroup$
    – fileunderwater
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 15:03
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    $\begingroup$ @fileunderwater Yes we'll add an address (which gives the name) $\endgroup$
    – Stéphane Staff
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 16:06
  • $\begingroup$ @JNat I moved recently (and haven't received the package yet). If the package hasn't been sent yet, can I change my mailing address? Thanks a lot :) $\endgroup$
    – Remi.b
    Commented May 7, 2016 at 21:40
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    $\begingroup$ It hasn't been shipped out yet, @Remi.b. You can send me an e-mail and I'll work on getting your address changed. $\endgroup$
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented May 8, 2016 at 9:52
  • $\begingroup$ @JNat could you let us know when the items have been dispatched? I haven't received anything yet, just thought to check in case something was wrong at my end e.g. emails filtered by junk mail :) $\endgroup$
    – rg255
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 11:34
  • $\begingroup$ Will do, @rg255 ;) $\endgroup$
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 11:51
  • $\begingroup$ @JNat What happened to this gift box? I had forgot about it, but haven't received anything so far after signing up. $\endgroup$
    – fileunderwater
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 22:25
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    $\begingroup$ It still hasn't been shipped, @fileunderwater. I'll update this meta post to let everyone know it's been shipped once it has been shipped ;) $\endgroup$
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Aug 2, 2016 at 9:53

4 Answers 4

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Wow! Thank you. I am pretty happy with this t-shirt and it feels good to receive a reward $\ddot \smile$. I will be happy to add a Biology.SE sticker on my laptop as well.

How about an Award too?

An award for the $n^{th}$ top users could be a nice reward and would allow users to add a line in their CV from our hard work here. $n$ could be 3, 5, 10 or 72 I guess. It also have the advantage that such reward would represent little cost to the site.

The award could state something like Award for outstanding online teacher in <Enter Two Main Tags> or something similar and be signed by StackExchange or Biology.StackExchange. The award could indicate the number of people reached too or some other glorious statistics.

For example for our best User @Chris (Congratulation Chris!), the award could state Award for outstanding online teacher in Human Biology and Biochemistry. ~491,000 people reached worldwide

I am not sure what to think about this idea. Please let me know if it sounds good or not.

Popularizing the reward philosophy

Is it the first time that SE offers such reward? If not, it could be an incentive for users to work harder for this website if it was indicated somewhere that such reward exist. Keeping secret the information about how many people would receive the reward would be a good idea.

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    $\begingroup$ You could just write this on your cv (not "award" but say you are a high ranking user having reached X thousand people and answered Y posts on subject Z... I did similar on a funding application: they wanted evidence of outreach and engagement with oublic) $\endgroup$
    – rg255
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 18:53
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    $\begingroup$ Yes, I actually did it (without much detail though) but a small award would look a little better especially for master students or even to eventual Bachelor students that may receive it. Do you think it is not worth bothering for that? $\endgroup$
    – Remi.b
    Commented Mar 23, 2016 at 18:57
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    $\begingroup$ I don't see what "official recognition" would add that your profile page/user ranking doesn't already show. SE already points out this information, that seems pretty "official" for what it's worth. $\endgroup$
    – terdon
    Commented Mar 26, 2016 at 11:37
  • $\begingroup$ @terdon Fair enough! $\endgroup$
    – Remi.b
    Commented Mar 26, 2016 at 16:30
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Follow up request, could we get the swag with the current designs rather than the first draft of biology graphics (see: Site design for Biology community). The graphics shown on the t shirt and stickers don't reflect our finalised design, it would be great to get those designs instead!

PS this is really cool, thanks stack exchange!

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    $\begingroup$ Yes we will do it $\endgroup$
    – Stéphane Staff
    Commented Mar 24, 2016 at 14:33
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Got this packet yesterday. Thank a lot! However, I'm surprised that the t-shirt and stickers use the old design proposal (not the current one) and doesn't include the name or the web address (which I mentioned in the comments in March). This means that the value as promotion material and publicity for the site is close to zero. I though StackExchange valued the branding of their sites more than this.

Even so, again thanks!

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    $\begingroup$ It is a shame the design wasn't updated to at least use our final icons even though they said they would, the old version has very little biology specific stuff on it :/ nevermind, free stuff is still free stuff... $\endgroup$
    – rg255
    Commented Aug 24, 2016 at 22:33
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Wow - looks very exciting! Could I suggest that (if there is any intention to rerun this) you maybe use recent rep increases rather than all-time totals? For example, run it every year and award the top scorers that year? Otherwise you could end up repeatedly rewarding historically prolific users who haven't been very active recently, which seems a bit unfair to new users.

(I admit to not being entirely unbiased here - I'm currently in the top twenty users this year but still need about 700 to reach the bottom of page 2 on the all-time rep list...)

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    $\begingroup$ Oh, the idea here is for this to be a one-off, as a celebration of the site having graduated and getting its own design — our plan is not to run this on a yearly basis :\ $\endgroup$
    – JNat StaffMod
    Commented Jul 27, 2016 at 16:41
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    $\begingroup$ @JNat Nooooo... :( $\endgroup$
    – arboviral
    Commented Aug 9, 2016 at 10:11

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