A group for DIY Drones moderators to discuss best community management practices.
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:
- Does the post start with an image/video or at least have one very close to the top?
- Are videos embedded? (Not a link to a video elsewhere)
- 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:
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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…
Read more…Scam???
Is this a scam, guy is posting on every group?http://diydrones.com/xn/detail/705844:Topic:2336557?xg_source=activity
Read more…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…
Read more…
Comments
Thomas: I don't want to be misunderstood. I don't think it is censorship at all. My question was for Sgt Ric, and was meant to support his actions in spite of his feelings. I have always been a strong proponent of evenly, and unapologetically applying the site guidelines, whatever they may be. I don't have to agree with them to apply them. I happen to agree with them.
The reason I volunteered to give up mod responsibilities was I was having trouble understanding the nuances of which rules to apply at that time, and did not want to contribute to the issues we were having at the time. I always believed in this team, the role of moderators in fairly, evenly applying the rules, out of responsibility, not from authority, and without personal bias.
Yes there are other pics/videos of tanks and automatic sentry turrets so we should do a few cursory searches to see what's about. (Not sure what you pulled so can't confirm from what I saw this morning) and yes I agree with pulling these types of threads but it is fairly clear they go against TOS and ppl like savant et al are doing this only to inflame... and my other .2 cents, Mike is spot on about the anti drone guy, and Sgr Ric, I know Thomas is a mod I meant bumping it up higher if unsure (Chris etc). Cheers.
Wow I missed a lot of action this morning! @Gary M:I agree with you 100% about the front page needing to be tamed and regulated a little better. That is something I am going to work on with Tom next week and will provide more details when they become available. @Sgt Ric: Don't worry too much about the things you posted 5 years ago. This site was way different and the posting of that kind of stuff wasn't frowned upon back in 2007. I'm going to spend a couple days next week going back a few years through all the content and clean up all the content that is against the TOS. I will post everything here I'm considering deleting before I do it. So we can all decide as a team if its something that should be removed.
@Gary,
Sometimes it is hard to vet a proposed blog post when you have five or more to burn through at a time. I believe that the instructional blog posts are good, but a small percentage of the recent blog posts are repetitive like the Sparkfun 2013 AVC.
TCIII
Ironically, the thread that DS posted the photo and his comment in was a blog which I had asked the original author to redact since it was in violation or the site guidelines.
I guess it showed up in a Google search which DS had done on weopons because of the original title.
The post looks as if I had been the author only because the real author deleted much of his commencts after Chris asked him to.
All in all the front page needs to be tamed. Not enough innovation too much reposting of old news. Sorry that's a pretty harsh statement I know.
Agreed: I removed the photo of the .45 which DS had used as an example after I notified him of my intention to do so and then added a note:
[Moderator note: photo removed with participation of poster Drone Savant]
I want to make sure that we have deleted or modified those weaponization blog posts or discussions that Drone_Savant identified so that we don't come across as being hypocritical.
TCIII
TC, I deleted my own reply from 2007 about that armed UAV testing, which is the post you asked about a few minutes ago.
I am embarrassed that it was my link to a Sentry Gun that DS was referring to earlier. (the link has long been invalid since the SpikedHumor site no longer exists)
I guess the atmosphere was a little different possibly, nor was I a moderator back then.
Flow down from upper management is in agreement with my decision to not publish Drone_Savant's blog post and to review previous blog posts that have promoted the weaponization of drones. Drone_Savant appears to have located the possible offenders for us.:-)
@Mike,
I do not believe that we are practicing censorhip when Chris Anderson has stated that we do not promote the weaponization of hobby drones and the posting of blogs and discussions that do so. If we have done so in the past, then possibly they got through while forum policy was being developed concering those issues. Since many of the weaponization of hobby drones are second hand posts, there are obviously other forums on the web for members to make such posts on.
TCIII
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