Top Members ?

I asked about being a Top Member a couple of years ago and never heard a thing back. I stepped away from the group until recently and hope to be more active again (as long as my health allows).

/members-area/top-members/#pifragment-5207=3

If anyone visits the site somewhat regularly, they can usually tell who a top member is.   It seemed to me, the most useful perk of being a Top Member was getting preference on Road Tests, or maybe getting some freebies for new product releases that vendors wanted feedback on. 

 I'm not a Top Member ,  and I'll admit too that I've slacked off quite a bit on E14 website visits without any Project14 activity or interesting webinars.  

 dougw A good thought but I don't know why I would put a blog where only a select few could view or comment on it. There are members that may be smarter than myself, hey that was a joke, everyone in their nitch is great.  The problem is that I have way too much going on. ie I wear too many hats. and have too many projects running concurrently, and a really crappy real-time switching. 

Oh well, that's my two or three cents. ~~ Cris H. 

Is it just me or do you also feel that we have less active members this year?

I visit the community once everyday, just to check on what the regular members are posting.

I have also noticed, the no. of blogs related to projects and contests have also reduced. For example, there was no "summer of" design challenge this year. There are no more knowledge based topics which had quiz and giveaways at the end, etc

I also blame myself a little for not participating in any activities since late 2023 till date owing to my bad health conditions. But I will try my best to participate more in the remaining months of 2024

I used to like the idea, but I am not sure anymore. I guess the owner of Element14 should consider motivation of people being here - there is internal and external. Only the external can be influenced from the outside, but it might attract people who only participate in order to get some benefits. I kind of like some simple profile status like how many posts a specific user made and maybe how many people found his/her post useful. It is up to the owner to reward the most active people to support the place growing - it might help, it might not.

Not sure how can a private section of a forum be useful.

BTW a few years ago there were claims E14 has 500 000 members. Looking at the Top participants box on the homepage, seeing myself around position 100-150 when writing ca. 1-10 discussion replies a month makes me think there might be ca. 30 very active members and I instantly spot their posts by avatars. The rest are mostly consumers (most of us have a job, school, family ...).

Since the platform change, I feel kind of lost here. I am a guy who prefers something like old-school discussion forums. The trouble is, there are so many platforms, forums, Discord and Slack server, that one could spend his entire day doing just "social electronics" :)

Activity on the site has dropped off - my own too.

It's hard to say why - I seem to have a lot of work demands but I think that may be a way of rationalising that E14 has dropped down my personal priority list a bit.

It started with the change to Verint which has definitely made the site less intuitive. I know that E14 people are working on this and I applaud that.

Having personal blogs makes sense to me - and I do use mine (not as much as I would like although I do have some things waiting to get written up.)

I don't think that the future of Top Members group is the biggest issue on E14 right now, but it is due for a bit of a purge/re-vamp/shake-up.

MK

I became a Top Memeber just before the move to Verint. I have to say that the community doesn't seem to be quite what it was - my own contributions included. It's hard to put a finger on it. Verint doesn't seem as usable, but I don't think that's everything. Maybe being busy with some intersting work means I'm not constantly on here seeing what's going on. I'm not sure.

Hi Doug,

dougw said:

I don't think there is a private Top Members group discussion area any more.

Yes, there's a whole group, I'm sure you're aware: Top Members 

dougw said:

There aren't any Top Members activities or perks other than a personal blog space.

That's not strictly true. As stated in the description link you made:

• You'll be given the first refusal at testing our up-and-coming hardware and technology

Top members are considered first for competition entries (aside from quizzes) to be chosen as competitors, and for any upcoming products to test.

There simply haven't been that many at the moment due to the team restructuring.

dougw said:

They do have a personal blog space, but this is very seldom used.

I appreciate that this is difficult to track if you're not subscribed to each blog application in that area.

dougw said:

I don't mind the change or demise at all - just observing that the Top Member idea has faded.

Do you think the Top Member designation is at all useful?

Should the Top Member designation even exist and if so how should it be defined?

Are there some currently active members who should become Top Members? 

The Community team are meeting next month to discuss different aspects of the Community from its design to its campaigns and programs. Perks for Top Members and how we want to shape that is a regular topic that I bring up and I'll be bringing it up then, too.