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:
You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!
Comments are closed.
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
Moderators: I was sorry to see that the "APM 2.5 with Ublox on a quadcopter - Issues - Disappointment" thread, as toxic as it had become, was deleted. Although we can delete individual posts that violate our TOS, we should never delete an entire thread. If one of you would like to PM me privately to discuss why this was done, I'd appreciate it. It will remain a private conversation, but in the interest of trust and clarity of mission, I'd like to know which one of you took this action and why.
I just approved the blog http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/vectornave-vn-200
Originally the author had put a link to http://neonile.com/electronics/45-vectornave-vn-200 mentioning "Read the full article here". But it was an another post from the same author in a different site. The only difference between the first and second posts is the link. The second post referred the real article which is http://www.vectornav.com/products/vn200-smt
I went ahead and changed the link in the first post with the real article link. This will by pass the intermediate post having the same content.
I felt like he is trying to get traffic to his(?) site. Just wanted to confirm with everyone, whether that is okay.
Well, it looks like KernalPanic is getting out of APM... I can only imagine the nightmares he caused 3DR tech support, what with that attitude of his.
I guess some people just have a mean outlook on life in general, and have some need to pass that on to others.
Wouter: Thanks. Mea culpa for approving her in the first place. I should have known better :-(
I just removed the blog post 'Best iphone Cell Phone Monitoring Software | Best Mobile Spy' since it was clearly spam. I also suspended the author, 'aisha aisha', for spam, because this blog post was her first acitivity on the site.
For future reference, her profile was: Female from Canada, no age, nothing in About Me and 'I like UAV' in UAV Interest.
Thanks Chris.
Ruwan: I discussed it with him and was convinced it was unique/interesting enough not to have to be put in the Buy/Sell section of the forum.
Everyone, I see a blog post about "selling a solar powered partially built airframe" keep on popping up. I've sent a message asking him to post it in the buy/sell section of the forum (which he has done later), also I've sent a link of the guidelines.
Now I see it is accepted by someone else. Just want to clarify weather it is the right thing to do..
Ruwan.
Monroe: Fortunately, the post went out in the RSS feed before you deleted it, so I was able to recover the text from that and send it to the author (Austin Chapman) for reposting.
I rejected the video blog post of a FPV "vs a 15-year-old victim" because it demonstrated unsafe flying
-
547
-
548
-
549
-
550
-
551
of 611 Next