A group for DIY Drones moderators to discuss best community management practices.

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Moderator Basics

These are the basic instructions for moderators:

Most of what you'll be doing is approving (or not) blog posts and otherwise keeping things running smoothly.

With blog posts, the key things to check before approving are:

  1. Does the post start with an image/video or at least have one very close to the top?
  2. Are videos embedded? (Not a link to a video elsewhere)
  3. Is the post informative, rather than asking a question or a request for help? (Those should be sent to the discussion forum).

Feel free to make modest edits (such as moving a photo to the top, or turning a video link into an embed) yourself. If the post should be in the discussion forum instead, paste the text into a Friend request to the author explaining that and delete the post. (Using a Friend request will hopefully take some of the sting out of having to reject their post ;-) )

When Moderating Comments:

Deletion is really the course of last resort, and tends to cause more trouble than it solves. Instead, we follow this escalation process: 

  • 1st course of action in case of TOS abuse: Gentle note in the comments asking people to play nice
  • 2nd: Edit the comment to remove offending piece and add: "[Moderator: Text edited to comply with site TOS]". It's nice to PM the member with an explanation, warning
  • 3rd: Lock comments. Also PM member with explanation/warning
  • 4th (only in cases of gross abuse): Delete comment. PM member
  • 5th (very rare, and only after multiple warnings): Ban member

Our Culture and Values:

Mark Harrison, one of our star moderators, articulated our culture and policies best with this post, which I'll just quote verbatim:

Here's my general feeling about a lot of things on this site; in fact, it's pretty much my general philosophy for large parts of my life:

        "It's more important to enable good things than prevent bad things"

For diydrones, this generally means:

--Be generous in accepting blog posts. We're not at a point where there are more submissions than can be confortably digested in a day. Likewise, the term "drone" is evolving at such a fast rate it's hard to pin down exactly what it means for everyone. So, I'm happy to lump in quadcopters, FPV, gimbals, RC, artistic aerial videos, electronics, radios... all kinds of stuff that meets my nebulous criterion of "generally interesting to the diy drone community."

Now of course it can be protested, "what if we're flooded by dozens or hundreds of posts on marginally related topic X?" And my response would be, "let's wait until that happens; we'll have tons more context and it will be easier to make a specific decision then than make some globally encompassing set of rules now. We may all even be a little bit smarter and a little bit wiser!"

-- Be generous in approving users. Lots of people aren't comfortable with revealing too much information about themselves, or may not have a particularly cogent reason for joining a site. I'm somewhat of an exception to this case... "Are you asking what I'm interested in? Let's talk about me, it's one of the most interesting topics we can discuss, don't you agree?" But for a lot of people, they may interested in the topic, but not interested in telling you why.

-- Feel free to make mistakes, and be nice when other people are making mistakes. Sometimes the most interesting things happen when things go awry. For better or worse, sometimes the most education things as well!

I think this is pretty much in agreement with how the site has been run historically. It's a site for amateurs, by amateurs (keeping in mind the defintion of "amateur"... from the French "lover of"), and as such has had a pretty wide-ranging scope of what's acceptable. That's served the site well, enabling it to be as relevant (or even more!) in 2013 as it was when it was founded.

Of course there are big exceptions to this "don't sweat the bad stuff" philosophy -- brain surgery, rocket launches, and skydiving come to mind -- but I think it's a useful guideline for a site such as ours.

 

More instructions:

Guidelines

When is a blog not a blog?

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Comments

  • Moderator
    Wow, Ning2 looks really great on mobile. I had sort of drifted away as my browse-time went more on my phone, so this is great.
  • Moderator

    Should hit 90k users today or tommorrow.

  • Moderator

    @Michael Pursifull, I saw he had been removed... I didn't do that but was intending to do this when I saw his links.

    It was clearly a violation and as you mentioned, there was no legit content or discussion, so don't worry, he was on his way out ...just someone beat you to the punch, thats all.

  • Moderator

    I began to suspend the member sojibarif, whose only content was spamming forums with illegal download links, no discussion, no content, just multiple links to the new avengers movie. My intent was to pause his mashing the post on more discussions, then come here and ask. However it looks like before I got to pulling that trigger someone deleted him, as it said he is no longer a member. 

    I figured i’d still check in here, and see if that immediate action was okay? I mean, it was clearly illegal, he had no other content, posts, replies or interest in UAVs. Didn’t do much as say hello, and I only intended to suspend him and come socialize here. His posts had already generated a dozen or so views, between them, on its way to hundreds, no doubt. Thoughts?

  • Moderator

    Thanks Chris.  I knew about the tie between the two (you, mainly), I just wasn't sure if the DIY Drones name itself had a presence at any of those shows. 

  • 3D Robotics

    We will have a Dronecode keynote and booth at Interdrone, which probably accomplishes the same thing. In general, Dronecode is the commercial side of this community

  • Moderator

    Is there much appeal to having a DIY Drones booth at a trade show (Commercial UAV Expo)? 

  • 3D Robotics

    Bravo! Good call

  • Moderator

    Hi Guys

    I deleted a post today selling fake passports for the UK and many other fake items. I dont believe that this is type of sale permitted and feel it devalues DIY drones. 

    If I have exceeded my responsibility then I apologise. 

  • Moderator

    Hey TC, is it possible (or allowed) to change my username here? 

    I use my real name everywhere else....I figure I might as well use it on the site where its the standard. 

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100KM

commercial advertisment post

Hi dear moderators, Recently I notice there are some " pure " advertising post from Skywalker / TopXgun ect. Where some of the post being deleted some make it to the blog post. I'm not really sure if this type of " blog " have a place here or we should delete it. As for the Skywalker, I saw their blog being deleted and a few day latter they post again with some minor modification, but still look 100% " advertisement " to me. It seems that they do " NOT " get the message or understand what their…

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Developer

Commercial Groups on DIYD

I think we need to discussion about 'commercial' groups like this new one i just noticed (especially since as the site is getting bigger)http://diydrones.com/group/outdoor-roboticsA quick visual search through gave me these 'commercial' looking groupshttp://diydrones.com/group/voltahttp://diydrones.com/group/ugcshttp://diydrones.com/group/uavsaShould we not be thinking that groups created by commercial enterprises require some form of sponsorship of the site or development work in the DiyDrone…

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3 Replies