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
Their is the link go ahead and re post the blog if you feel I deleted it unfairly
http://uavstar.en.alibaba.com/product/658346150-213422866/abc.html?...
@Joshua.
I guess it mattered in that another moderator had approved the blog, so there probably should have been some discussion here first.
First up though, yeah I don't think it would have mattered had it been deleted at the approval stage, especially if the poster was informed of the decision. I usually send the poster an email with the text portion of their post so they can use it somewhere else if they want.
Totally different topic...
Onthe Approve blog Posts page, I wonder if we could move the Delete link over on the right side as I find if I am working on my Playbook it is possible to click that link by accident. And as we know that is undoable.
It was posted by a developer
Yes it had been approved. But policy wise I didn't think it mattered.
Ok, on the other side of the fence, had the blog already been approved? Probably should have asked that first...if so then yest, it should have been discussed here first.
Darn, I had a whole spiel entered then got distracted and away it went.
Just wanted to say that...
a) our site policeies state
I don't think any amount of teamwork should circumvent those policies. If we will tolerate some posting of illegal or "military" use of UAVs then lets amend the policies tos provide for that... we all know what a little bit of bad publicity can do and having constant postings of availability of "attack" UAVs or millitary applications on the front page of the site is going to attrtact some bad publicity. We are not here to discuss those uses of UAVs, at least I'm not. There are other sites for that discussion.
Yes to teamwork, but lets make the guidelines so each member can do her/his part and not feel like they have to ask permission fore every decision they make. Leave the group meeting fore more important decisions.
I always defer to others who are more experienced when I am unsure of a post or member application...but I like to think that when I make a decision on my own that is based on the existing published policies...that the group will back me up.
Lets change those rules if we have to...allowing some things and not others is a bit wishy-washy without policies in writing so everyone knows about it...
I agree 100% on the Team effort, it being Chris' site and decision and everything else. Next time I will bring it to the attention of the group. But when I saw the title of the blog explain who is selling it. calling it an attack UAV or Drone and telling how much it cost. On top of all of that all it had in the blog was a photo of the UAV, 1 sentence that said If you wanna take it up a notch, and then a provided link to purchase it. In my mind I saw that as someone who was deliberality advertising for people to use it in a harmful manner. Also I saw a new member on diydrones comment on it expressing concern over the blog and the killing radius as I deleted it without thinking.
Again I apologize if I offended anyone. Once I deleted it I came here to mention to the group that I saw a harmful blog and deleted it and that's when I came upon the conversation about the blog that I already deleted.
Ultimately all content on is determined by Chris, since it's his site. We as moderators contribute to that decision. For instance, Chris has approved military posts before. I would suggest that you check with this group and bring it to our attention before any action is taken. It should be a team effort, IMHO.
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