We plan to have a “Life Member” award that would last for good but don’t have the qualifications yet. At minimum you would need to be part of the Core Team for a long time.
I just want to point out that there might be some people that are completely settled in their headphones and are maybe coming here to focus their time and contributions in source gear (DACs, amps, etc.). Maybe that first point could be changed to be more general to allow for a complete review of ANY headphone related gear.
Similarly, I’m wondering if this second point about a percentage based requirement might get tricky if/when this forum grows to a large size. Particularly, I could see this unintentionally favoring certain people over others. For instance, it is already clear that headphone focused threads far outnumber source gear threads by like a 10x factor. Again, if a member here is settled in headphones and isn’t looking for upgrades, but instead has a lot of DAC and amp experience and focuses their contributions and time spent here in those threads, the 25% of ALL topics requirement could make that more challenging for that user. So let’s say in a 100 day period 1000 topics get created, and only 100 of those are source gear related, that user would have to find 150 additional non-source gear threads (and seemingly uninteresting to that user) in order to meet the qualifications.
And I don’t think this potential issue is just related to users focused on source gear. I know from my time on head-fi, SBAF, and reddit, that there is a ton of variety of threads that get generated daily and a lot of it might not interest me just because it might have to do with gear that I am not really thinking about like IEMs, budget headphones, vinyl, etc. So even though I might not visit a large proportion of the threads available on those other forums, I still spend just as much time and contribute on very specific ones than most users. So it would be nice to find a way of adjusting this requirement such that it encourages core team members to be very active overall, but also allow for people that might have a more narrow interest in a subset of topics.
When I wrote “headphone review” I didn’t intend to limit it to headphones… Just reflexive word-choice. I’ll fix that right away.
As far as number of posts read, you’re right. I don’t want to force the drudgery of having to keep up with topics you aren’t interested in. Would you suggest lowering the threshold or using a different metric altogether?
It’s harder to define, but quality commenting. Someone whose name you read, and then you read the post because at least every 10 posts or so, something they say resonates and makes you say HMMM… I’ve got to do|try|test|see|hear|experience that.
I like to gadfly and tease on many of my posts - those don’t count. If I can do or upload something funny, that doesn’t count either. But I also like to contribute every once in a while, something that someone else might find worthwhile.
BTW, it would not be a good idea to have a “class clown” badge.
It seems there are 2 components of participation you are trying to encourage.
This point would be to encourage consistency in coming to the forums, but it doesn’t have a time component built-in so a person could simply login every other day and never participate.
This point seems to be an accountability check to make sure the user is actually spending a sufficient quantity of time reading through the forums. I’m not entirely sure how your data tracker works for each user, but it seems to log the amount of time a user has spent in the forums? If that is the case, maybe you could just set a minimum amount of time logged within the 100 day period? Presumably that would achieve the same goal as setting a “threads viewed” requirement? Both would ensure the user is spending enough time in the forums to be a core member, but the time requirement method would allow the user to spend that time in whichever threads are most important to him/her.
Seems I’m a bit late to the party but excellent idea! I like that your encouraging regular participation as a requirement for the Core Team qualifications, a lot of what others have said is 100% relevant
I like the 100 day rolling period moving forward and I will be curious to see how the community here grows with this goal in mind!
As for the threshold, I may change it not to a % of new posts but maybe a metric of time in a variety of topics. I see that for now there’s one main board hopefully moving forward there may be the development of a variety of topic boards with time spent in each being part of the requirements of Core Team.
Either way your starting list of loaners is exciting! As is the arrival of an entirely new community
I’m working on changing the requirement to being time-based, but for now, we’re going to reduce the number of topics to 15% based on your feedback. I agree that we don’t want an incentive to spend time in topics you aren’t interested in.
One of, and probably the, biggest benefits to being a Core Team member is that you qualify for the Community Preview Program. And one of the requirements for using that is that you post a review of any item of gear you get via that program.
I do know, for sure, that to remain a Core Team member you must maintain “Trust Level 3”, also known as “Regular”. That is automatically handled on a 100-day rolling basis … so active community participation is certainly an on-going requirement.
I’ll let @andrew or @taronlissimore comment on whether posting at least one review in every 100-day period is also a requirement to maintain Core Team membership - or if it is just required in the initial qualifying period. I can see reasonable arguments for either case.
