Update: The proposal in question has been implemented.
We recently had a discussion about the celebration tag that raised some important issues, but did not result in a consensus. I'd like to pitch the following solution to the community.
Let's consolidate all celebration posts into one bumpable, big-list meta question, similar to the thread for reopen requests.
These are several reasons that I want to propose this.
These posts are not questions, and they are all very similar. I know we allow other unconventional threads to be posted as questions, but this is very clearly a family of such posts. It would make sense to aggregate them into one place to be viewed all at once, like a big-list.
Celebrations make more sense as answers than questions. Congratulations posts don't need to be answered. Sometimes those being recognized post an answer to say thanks, but it makes just as much sense to express this sentiment as a comment. Since comments can be upvoted, this presents no loss of visibility.
Bumping an answer list allows for continuous recognition of past achievements. Many users may not think to use the search to read through past celebrations, and even so, the interface is not as good as a list of answers. This way, every time a new celebration occurs, we not only get to celebrate the occasion at hand, but remember the reasons for past celebrations, too.
Shaking up tradition broadens the format to allow celebration of other cool achievements. Two months ago, Martin Sleziak opened this chat room as an experiment, and I think it's really great. The informality of the chat format has allowed a variety of "quirkier" achievements to be recognized, such as high "meta-rep" and crazy good editing. It's really cool to see these celebrations of individuality alongside those of pure numbers. However, the chat format has its problems. Discussion is intermingled with the list of results, which makes them more difficult to read. The visibility is inarguably lower, there's no voting to show appreciation, it's less accessible to newcomers, and, as demonstrated by the comments in this thread, some users just plain don't like to use chat. A consolidated celebrations thread would be allow us to adopt some of this flexibility, in addition being more unobtrusive to those who consider these posts off-topic. I do think we should still use this room- it's a great place to talk about data explorer, and a great platform to celebrate smaller achievements that are not big enough to warrant a meta post. But we need something else, too.
The main thing we'd lose would be having the name of the person being celebrated in the title of the question, which would then get less attention on the meta front page. One way we might compensate for this could be to change the accepted answer whenever a new celebration is posted, thus identifying the "incumbent celebration."
What do you think, community?