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

  • Moderator
    Michael Pursifull February 1, 2013 at 10:18pm
    What do you expect? The rules are prettily plainly written, and member users see them implimented in capricious ways. Mark gets accused of shutting down a related but almost off topic reply to the question of how the prices could be reasonable given that the market forces do not work the same, which sounds to him like off topic, politics, but to the author, it was simply a reply to a question about the direct post. JJ is defending mark and backing up your own defense of mark, taking public responsibility for deleting the post. This is only a fraction of the confusion and sense of capricious favoritism in content handling by mods that you are seeing. I understand the liberal approach used, we seem to ask "what was the authors intent?" And if we think it is a commentary, a joke, satire, etc then it isn't really a militarized drone. But there are many cultures, many non-English speakers, quite a few ppl on the autism spectrum/aspergers, and people without the same social sensitivities. Rules are rules. Start moderating on your perception of the intent of the writer (especially when that author wrote less than a sentence) and you'll create this nonsense. I couldn't care less about the issue. My concern has always been about how seemingly inconsistent moderation reflects on the entire group of moderators, who are themselves representitives of the entire community.
  • Ellison Chan February 1, 2013 at 9:50pm

    Ok, guys I know we have differences in opinions on that Attack Drone post, but let's not start airing our dirty laundry on the public forum.  That's what this discussion group is for.

  • Moderator
    Michael Pursifull February 1, 2013 at 9:51am
    I would guess that the blog you approved had a date in the past, or possibly the future.
  • Ellison Chan February 1, 2013 at 9:47am

    Wierd problems with the forum? I just approved a blog, and it doesn't appear in the blog list.  Also I commented on the blog "Criminalizing Drones in Oregon" yesterday, and don't my comment there either. Does anyone have an e-mail record of my comment, as we don't get e-mails about our own comments.

  • Ron Jacobs January 31, 2013 at 7:57pm

    i approved some blogs today , even read that one in Spanish, but left it for someone else to approve or not. Hope I didn't accidentally approve it. I couldn't tell what it was about and it had no image...so I certainly didn't intend to approve it if I did...

  • Ron Jacobs January 31, 2013 at 7:55pm

    Mark, yeah I follow the thread, just surprised me that a fair number of comments vanished from the thread.

  • Ellison Chan January 31, 2013 at 7:39pm

    I see it's already gone.

  • Ellison Chan January 31, 2013 at 7:38pm

    It does appear so.  I contacted Antonio.  English is not very strong.  I gather, from his response that he wanted some instruction manual to the APM.  So I sent him some links.  I'm going to delete that blog.

  • Joshua Johnson January 31, 2013 at 7:32pm

    No offense to anyone in here. But did we add some new moderators possibly recently? That maybe don't know 100% how things work yet?

  • Joshua Johnson January 31, 2013 at 7:30pm

    I have been seeing a lot more blogs get approved lately with no media in them.  I'm curious why just recently this is starting to happen.

This reply was deleted.

Forum

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…

Read more…
Started by keeyen pang
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…

Read more…
Started by Bill Bonney
3 Replies

Photos