A group for DIY Drones moderators to discuss best community management practices.

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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:

  1. Does the post start with an image/video or at least have one very close to the top?
  2. Are videos embedded? (Not a link to a video elsewhere)
  3. 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?

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Comments

  • About Kelsey Uh

    About Me:
    Specializes in the sale of real estate in Manhattan.
    She has access to 100% of real estate that is currently
    for sale and views them daily and knows what suits
    her clients’ needs and wants. And her team analyzes
    real estate on the market daily to find specific
    features and the best price on behalf of her
    clients so that they can save time and money.
    She works mostly as a buyer’s broker and her
    commissions are paid by the sellers so her
    services are at no cost to the buyers.
    Tell us a bit about your UAV interest
    NONE
    Hometown:
    New York

    The above just popped up in the new members queue. Doesn't really seem legit to me. Im going to decline this application.

  • I deleted the blog "Unencrypted GPS Lets Hackers Take Control of Drones" from Alex, because there have been blog posts about this before. Also the post lacked media and didn't contain any input from the user. It was just a copy-paste of parts of a news story and a URL to the full story.

  • I deleted the blog, "Youcanfly.ch is going to pirate. Shipping fees are coming down." , and messaged the blogger.  It was just some kind of customer announcement for his web site.

  • Moderator

    I moderated Jack Crossfire's comment on the blog post

    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/how-not-to-work-on-your-quad

    Original Text:

    Got to pay for those puffed lipos somehow.  Those Chinese textile workers are grave robbers.

  • I approved Eric Schuster's member application he said this: 

    About Me:

    Completely insane, unlimited patience for details, passion for problem solving, interest in electronics started at age 5 and chemistry at age 13.

    2 minutes ago I noticed another pending member application saying 
    Completely insane, unlimited patience for details, passion for problem solving, interest in electronics

    So i declined it as it was exactly the same save the age references.

  •  I added this to the post.  Feel free to use this graphic for any posts you want to approve, but don't want to approve a post with not images.3689464311?profile=original

    [ EDITOR'S NOTE:  Please add some media to improve this post]

  • I don't understand why people are approving posts without actually looking at the contents.  I know in this case, it was definitely not a race condition, since I added that note, and know how much time there was between that and the approval.

    I would recommend that, if you don't have time to look inside the message, don't click on the approve button.  Other moderators will take care of it.

  • Moderator

    This one slipped by: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/inexpensive-lidar-project

    It has a moderator's note and no media.

  • This blog in the queue has a link to outlook, and seems to trying to access mail.

    http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A901535

    Whoever messaged the user, please find out why his actual link does not match with the text of his link.

  • Moderator
    I was kinda hoping Jack would have realized his mistake and self-moderate.
This reply was deleted.
100KM

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…

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1 Reply
Developer

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…

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3 Replies