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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Comments are closed.
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
Josh, you voted 8 hours ago to decline a blog post because it was irrelevant... And now you "accidentally" post one yourself.
As Mark mentioned, we cannot appear to have different rules for different levels of members.
@Joshua, delete it... if we accept that then there's almost nothing that we should not accept. And the next person with a rejected off-topic blog post will (rightly) claim that the admins favor their own pet projects while rejecting others.
Hey Everyone, That Blog I just posted an hour ago about that open source community project was actually a blog I was working on and saved as a draft and I totally forgot about it and it automatically posted it. I want to check with everyone and see if you think that the blog is worth keeping? It's not really drone related whatsoever...but it is about open source projects.
I don't think it matters if an account is used by one or many individuals. It's the actions of the account user that defines whether or not it's acceptable. Besides how can we police this? I'm not sure what Gary is basing his statement on with respect to DS, except that perhaps since he is so vocal in so many discussions that the sheer volume of posts might reveal several different styles of writing.
Should shared accounts be allowed?
I say decline it. It's irrelevant to this site.
I do not think that this waiting blog post is relevant to DIY Drones: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A...
Comments?
TCIII
I meant greet not great
@TC I think that thread has gone too far already and I don't want to comment on it and be dragged in. I wonder, do other forums have a 5 comments away from topic so close sort of thing. I believe DS is an account run by at least three people so you never know if you are getting the more reasonable person. That's what one of them told me anyway....
I think if we only great negative stuff with positive stuff it will be very hard for them to keep arguing. That's what the unicorn and fairies at the bottom of the garden told me to say.
It never ceases to amaze me what people will say to other people online. You would never do it in real life, however much you disliked the person. At the back of your head your mother saying, if you having nothing nice to say say nothing at all would be rattling around.
At the same time, tamed the DS collective might be a force for good.
I wonder should they be made a mod........
There is a possible flame war brewing in Hooks' blog post: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A... So far DS and the members he is sparing with have kept it civil. Please keep an eye on it as I do not want it to get out of hand.
TCIII
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