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 May 20, 2014 at 4:04am

David Rodriguez is lining up four or five posts at a time with a picture and learn about batteries or ESCs or whatever and a link to his new site and little else. I have warned him that I will have to ban him if he keeps trying that and approved one of his posts.
Admin

Morli May 18, 2014 at 10:11am

Michael,

You are right, thanks for the link , very interesting read.

cheers
Moderator

Michael Pursifull May 17, 2014 at 4:11pm

Given the way moderation functions within the Ning platform, I suspect this has specific application to our task/community:

http://m.slashdot.org/story/202173
Moderator

Sgt Ric May 16, 2014 at 6:39am

I would not approve such a vague response to the questions.

I know some users are in a rush to join and share with our community, and often give short answers, but those blanks mean either no respect for the process, or a bot.

Granted, we have seen that female names unfortunately are a red flag as well, but I don't screen just on that.
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III May 16, 2014 at 5:48am

This recently approved member looks like a possible spammer:

A Male with the name of Cristina?

TCIII
Admin

Morli May 14, 2014 at 12:15pm

Sgt,

No, using text reader , he can hear them/blog but it does not work on the video. So he cannot evaluate the TOS violation of this video. :(
Moderator

Sgt Ric May 14, 2014 at 12:09pm

How did "Blind mod" pass roll call?

Selective blindness?
Admin

Morli May 14, 2014 at 11:57am

Good luck TC for AVC. We will look out for you via live show if it is there.

Cheers
Admin

Morli May 14, 2014 at 11:55am

I think the name of long lost Nice girl was Sally or some thing like that. :)

As to blog that got approved even though it was mentioned not to, I guess "Blind mod" is back, he cannot read the heading, cannot understand the blog and weight its TOS conditions. Well what can I say.

Cheers

Morli
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III May 14, 2014 at 11:53am

I have been conversing with Sparkfun via email concerning the AVC and ordering spare parts for my rover that will be shipped with it to Boulder, CO so I have missed some of the action this afternoon.

Sparkfun has accepted my Slash rover proof of concept input so I am good to go again for the 2014 AVC Peloton class.

TCIII