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
Chris began this site to share, support, and encourage like-minded members of a growing community.
As moderators, we owe it to our members to try to keep the atmosphere of this site positive, supportive, and engaging.
I am sorry to see that not all people are positive and open, and often have very different outlooks on life and often have hidden agendas.
The nature of this medium can lead to misunderstanding of intent and tone, but that cannot explain the rude and agressive behaviour Chris mentions.
Behavior which we have a right and obligation to curb before it sets a very different tone for this community.
Tom: I think his behavior has been consistently rude and negative. Remember this is his second banning. I see no indication that he has changed his stripes. Also, his request was all too typically curt: "unban me". No acknowledgment of what behavior led to his suspension or promise to reform.
Wouldn't he be happier at the new spinoff sites like dronespeak dot com or dronecafe dot com?
They invite political/military discussion/arguments.
Is everybody getting the "you have a new post to approve" messages? I was fiddling with my mail preferences and now it seems I'm not getting these messages anymore.
I joined this group a few weeks back, hearing that you could do with some help, but every time I get a notification about something needing moderating I check the queue and its clear.
So, you guys are doing an incredible job of keeping on top of the posts, but if you're feeling weary of it just ease off on the gas pedal a little, there's plenty of us waiting to jump in to help if you were to leave the queue unattended for more than a few minutes.
Having said that, a roll call isn't a bad way to filter the mods group down a little.
I'm not talking about changing the content, just moving images around to conform to our posting rules.
Are you saying that moderators don't have the required intelligence to make such a decision that it has to be deferred to a higher authority?
Many of us have university degrees, and some of us have graduate degrees. We've most likely worked in the high tech environment, where hierarchy is not the rule. It's more of a meritocracy. Everyone can use their own judgement, and there is no anarchy.
We volunteer our time to make this site better.
Editing content smells of censorship.
We have tools to moderate those posts that do not conform to the site guidelines such as PMs and suspensions, but we have been advised to limit banning and deletions until group discussion.
Sure we can help posters by adding graphics or suggesting the author do so.
Actually I have replaced some overt swear words with special characters, and added the usual moderator notation, but I have given that up as a little Victorian. Now I would PM that person to edit their comments themselves.
As we have seen in the last few weeks especially, there are 75 different opinions as to how to moderate, so I take a more cautious approach.
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