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
I don't have a problem seeing that image.
The problem probably is with the domain where that image is being hosted.
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/7092/freepilot.png
Whomever is seeing the frog, does not have that domain in its registry.
I'm afraid I see an adult scamming the site on that post chaps but lets see what your love brings.
Mark, from where I sit (South Africa) the pictures are just frogs and a message stating that these images are not available so from here there is no media on that post.
English-only blog posts make sense to me. If anybody knows of Chinese-language blogs I would appreciate hearing about them!
Mohammed Hanif Kabir added the pictures and an apology up at the top. I moved one of the pictures to the top, advised him that was the standard, and approved.
I agree that we should be careful not to approve posts without pictures.
Good points Wouter.
For the record, I don't expect anyone to agree with everything I say, or even with anything I share. It does seem useful for this group to discuss the various views and thoughts, however. I hope no one in this forum mistakes the constructive presentation of different views as conflict. I respect my peers whether or not we agree on everything/anything, and I can have one view and yet implement the wider community view as a moderator, even if the two are not the same.
I do not favor the idea of creating separate groups by language. I don't see anything wrong with people using whatever language they can in the existing group(s). I think it is better to bring people together rather than create separate rooms for them to break off and work in relative isolation. I understand your point about the main page (but to me, this just means that any other language stories should be published inline with an English translation, not that we should exclude other languages entirely from the front page.)
I too agree that we should keep the front page free from non-English blogs, as we use that page to stimulate interest in the board.
But, I think having non-English groups is a good idea. It would help to attract and retain non-English members, who would otherwise not be able to participate. I don't see it as a dividing the community, since those who are proficient in English, would most likely participate in English and the larger community. Allowing groups based on language will allow us to more inclusive, and bring in those who are no so proficient in English.
Seems to me that there are times where using other languages includes more people, makes it more accessible to them, but there are also many ways in which using other languages excludes and divides the community. Where any language is used to be inclusive and not exclusive or divisive, it's a win. And it's not just language that does this. Personally, I was a little distressed to see people creating "local/regional" groups like the UK, Italian, African and Western Australian groups. There are collaborations, discussions, solutions, and problems discussed in these regional groups that would benefit the general groups, but they are lost to the rest of the members because most members will never see those discussions. Thus, it seems to me that, while not intended to be decisive, it is easy to divide all the same. I think the same is true with language. It is hard to get it right, to promote sharing and collaboration, simply by defining "acceptable languages." Rather, I suggest it is beneficial to prefer a single, sharing language, but to extend help and encouragement in any languages we can, and, where possible, to provide a running translation along side in the most widely used language so most members can benefit from the discussion, not just the two talkers. Sanctioning specific languages in some formal way (as with defining a required single language) does not seem in the right spirit to me, it is exclusive and divisive, I believe. The first leads to fragmentation of the community across artificial language (rather than topic) lines, and the second excludes those who cannot participate as much without occasional help in their native tongues.
I personally find it very annoying when moderators approve blogs without media, because it makes harder on the rest of us to properly enforce the rule. It is even more annoying when, like in this last case, a comment from a fellow moderator (at the top of the blog!) has been ignored. I really believe that we should be very strict in enforcing this rule. It also makes us look bad when one moderator PMs a user about his blog and then another moderator just approves the blog. I have seen this happen multiple times.
On the subject of languages, I know I would find it very annoying if front page blogs where in languages like Chinese or French. I can´t read Chinese and having blog posts in Chinese (on the front page), would, for me, have a very negative impact on the overall viewing experience of DIYDrones.
My suggestion would be, that for non-English languages, people use groups instead. Like the German and Italian groups that already exist.
Just my 2 cents,
Wouter
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