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
Ellison, I think there's a difference between affiliate codes and buddy codes... Affiliate codes don't give a discount to the user. My only complaint with buddy codes is that I'm always too slow to use them and somebody else gets the discount instead! :-)
I messaged CrashingDutchman, and suggested he add more DIY content like actually show himself flying something. I have not problem with any buddy codes, since it translates to discounts for everyone who uses it. My test for approval is usually, to what degree the post benefits the community, and level of interest.
regarding the foldable frame: CrashingDutchman has made several posts of this type... basically cutting and pasting new HobbyKing product announcements, of stuff he hasn't tried out himself, while adding his own affiliate code to the link.
I'm happy when people review things based on their own experience, or make pointers to interesting new products (such as I did on the HobbyKing wifi receiver), and am fine with posting affiliate codes (also, as I did).
But it looks like CrashingDutchman is veering more towards "spam-like" behavior (choosing words carefully) and should be encouraged to post more entries with more value than just affiliate links.
I removed the affiliate link from this post ("&aff=5361") but will be happy to put it back in if there's a consensus to do so.
Case by case, I think. If he actually decides to post something remotely close to DIY or open source I'd say approve.
Btw, speaking of advertisements. I flagged the post yesterday regarding the HK foldable frame for more DIY content, but someone ended up approving it before more content was added. To me without some degree of DIY, like the guy actually buying one and flying it, it's just an ad for HK.
I'm sorry but I think that these OSRC blog posts are getting pretty useless. I think that they are borderline getting free advertising for a product that hasn't been demonstrated to work as of yet or be completely open source. What are everyone else s viewpoints on this??
already did, good catch guys...
His post on jasonshorts blog "Help testing radios" does seem a lot like spam to me. I vote that we kick him from the site?
He's a brand new member approved today...
http://www.diydrones.com/profile/ShawnTymchak
-only the one post, and to an inactive thread. (and no, it had nothing to do with cats)
You know, I wonder if maybe CAT is another darn anachronism that we have so many in this community?
Were the cats flying autonomously or under RC control? Was it FPV? If not I'd lean towards spam.
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