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
Yeah, like I said I didn't see the post either, so my opinion is not based on that post, unfortunately. When I say relaxed, I don't be throw away the rules. If a post is controversial, the poster should be informed as to why. Then they can make the changes before approval. This is opposed to deleting it, before they have had a chance to make corrections.
Yeah, I didn't see the original post so I probably should just stay out of it, but if we are "relaxing" the moderation guidelines, we should also "relax" the site policies to reflect that and to provide better direction to moderators and other members as to what is acceptable to post.
Specific to links to online stores, we have approved many such blogs before. It has been discussed, and basically as long as it doesn't read like and advertisement, and is contributing to the community, we should approve it. After all people come on here to get people's opinions on what to and what not to buy. That's a part of the community. It gives everyone a chance to give an opinion on the products to the benefit of others.
I agree with Mark on a more relaxed moderation. I want to encourage posters to post, and not police the forum. In fact, the CIA, FBI, KGB, RCMP, CSIS are free to participate in this board, and contribute. Our members do nothing illegal, and if some are, then hopefully these people will let us know before it gets too far.
Joshua, you're relatively new here, so let me offer these guidelines for new moderators.
- focus on things such as approving posts and members.
- don't disapprove posts or members -- wait for a more experienced moderator to do so, and note why it's been disapproved. Mods will generally post here when this happens.
- read the moderators thread from the beginning. There's not that much, and you'll see some of the discussions that have led to our current policies, which seem to be working well.
- don't delete anything. Leave that to Chris or a moderator who has been around a while.
- participate in the moderator discussion (as you're doing)
- don't make yourself a featured member or feature too many of your own posts
Overall, it seems a more relaxed moderation policy has contributed to the site's growth.
Someone should contact Kevin Hester and see if he wants to repost the blog.
@Mark Harrison
I think we should let the original poster do the reposting, if he desires to do that.
@Joshua
I was backing you up Joshua...
And if that link was the post...I would have deleted it too. A direct link to a sellers store page? at very least it should have been posted in the Buy and Sell forum not blogged.
"Their is the link go ahead and re post the blog if you feel I deleted it unfairly"
Thanks Joshua, I'll do that. What was the title line?
If you want the CIA, FBI, FAA, ETC crawling all over the site that's your decision not mine.
The blog was posted be Kevin Hester The developer and the exact words below the picture were:
If you feel you wan't to take it up a notch:P
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