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

Admin

Thomas J Coyle III July 31, 2014 at 4:11pm

These kind of blog posts are getting kind of old DJI flying over police station Should we approve it?

TCIII
Moderator

Gary Mortimer July 30, 2014 at 9:33pm

Just up, I did'nt see the 3d printing post, the Guardian post also offended me as well. Many folks don't like that paper in the UK and its an easy target. The comments really have nothing to do with the Guardian.

How are we going to get more builds and technical on the front page?? Other than the dreamers and schemers I mean.
Moderator

John Church July 30, 2014 at 7:09pm

What happened to the nice blog on drones and 3d printing? Was that a user-deleted blog, or did someone catch an issue?
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III July 30, 2014 at 5:28pm

@Bill,

I am in agreement with your comments concerning the "The Guardian, Wrong About Everything, All Of The Time". I am presently on travel, but would have sent it back to its author had I been on-line when it appeared in the blog post queue.

TCIII
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III July 30, 2014 at 5:26pm

@Gary,

Another member tried to post the Dronehunter article and I sent it back to him for publishing elsewhere on the web.

TCIII
Developer

Bill Bonney July 30, 2014 at 1:10pm

This post was approved? http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/like-to-know-how-the-educated-m...

The image doesn't relate to the article, not sure how "The Guardian, Wrong About Everything, All Of The Time" is drone related. And there is no 'words of wisdon' or commentary to focus a discussion. The link is to the House of Lords discussing sUAS. The comments on the article are small minded, but that's usually the case, so do they really need a voice front and centre for DIYD?
Moderator

Gary Mortimer July 29, 2014 at 10:31pm

Dronehunter on the front page really?? That one should have come up for discussion first.
Moderator

David Anders July 27, 2014 at 2:29am

Agree with Morli and share the same query with Gary. Bueller anyone?
Moderator

Gary Mortimer July 27, 2014 at 1:40am

Yeah my policy exactly with asdasdf types, I just wondered how that one got through.
Admin

Morli July 26, 2014 at 11:43pm

asdfgf case does not warrant any query , just delete them.