Reddit's Guinness World Record: Largest Online Secret Santa Game

Add it to their growing list of achievements and uplifting stories.

The Reddit community, well known to work together on large-scale projects, many involving social good, is now the proud owner of a Guinness World Record.

Officially, it's RedditGifts.com in the record books for its secret santa game, now the largest online. The site was acquired by Reddit a year ago.

RedditGifts announced its intention to go for the world record last fall and excitedly declared victory yesterday with the words "it is official."

Reddit user "someguyfromcanada" was given a prominent shoutout in a blog post announcing the news. User "kickme444" wrote:

In March 2011 (I think) we started getting PMs and emails from the reddit user someguyfromcanada. He was saying that he wanted to make it his personal mission to get reddit and redditgifts into the record books. He started with tweets and emails directed at Guinness, took the campaign to the reddit community and eventually, months later, Guinness decided that they were going to create a new world's record category for us! So everyone, please, take a moment and thank someguyfromcanada. Without him, this would have never happened.

Apparently, everyone involved in the effort is entitled to their own Guinness World Record certificate. RedditGifts wrote, "If you were a participant in Secret Santa 2011, you will get an email shortly with instructions on how to get an official Guinness certificate if you want one."

In all, 30,250 participants from 115 countries were part of the effort.

TechCrunch notes the popular secret santa game takes place year-round and involves pairing Redditors to exchange random gifts with each other.

Reddit's record isn't acknowledged yet by the official Guinness World Records website, which does acknowledge ITV in the United Kingdom for the largest Secret Santa game, but since RedditGifts shared certificates to prove their record, that'll likely change soon.