Moderators

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:

Guidelines

When is a blog not a blog?

Comments

Moderator

Gary Mortimer March 7, 2014 at 5:26am

49986
Moderator

Gary Mortimer March 7, 2014 at 5:25am

So who approved the we the people from Josh?? I notice he moved the date to make sure it was at the top.
Moderator

Michael Pursifull March 7, 2014 at 3:54am

Military content, what say you?

http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/mqm-105-aquila
Moderator

Gary Mortimer March 7, 2014 at 12:35am

Ha I need a kiln controller! Who knew ;-)

The Trappy thing will hopefully force the NPRM which in turn will start revealing to people just what ASTM F-38 is upto.
Moderator

Mark Harrison March 6, 2014 at 10:42pm

In a spirit of solidarity and celebration I posted Trappy's latest video...
Moderator

Sgt Ric March 6, 2014 at 12:15pm

We're at 49946.
Tonight's the night!
Moderator

Gary Mortimer March 5, 2014 at 8:29pm

Morli, TC and I wonder if we should not all open a beer on Saturday sometime together in a mumbles session to celebrate the 50k members. Its 49k now so it will be tomorrow (Friday for most) when it happens.
Moderator

Sgt Ric March 5, 2014 at 6:11am

I just approved another member request from a person who mentions their intention to create a drone for the armed forces.
saurav kumar.
I've asked this group before, but I don't recall the responses...
This doesn't make me comfortable.
Moderator

Gary Mortimer March 5, 2014 at 3:46am

I have moved the new forums RSS feed to the top of the pile on the left of the front page. Said I was going to do it once we hit 1000 signed up but have held off until today. There are many unanswered questions over there which don't disappear down the page as quickly as they do here.

Looks like I was optimistic with the 50k today but it will be this week at some stage.
Moderator

Mark Harrison March 4, 2014 at 12:52pm

@Gary, they are now!