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
reporting in
If you do send a PM, please explain that it's because we've got a problem with indiscriminate member approval and we need to cut our moderator lists to those who are most engaged with this user group and the process of constant moderation improvement. If they would like to be reinstated, perhaps you can get a commitment from them about this before you agree to do it.
I agree. Do a roll call here and remove all Moderators who don't respond. It's healthy to clean the list every now and then. If a moderator is wrongly removed, they can always ask to be reinstated.
-Chris
TC, I would say the Nova post is a dupe.
Hey everyone! I just saw everything that happened. Did everything get resolved and figured out?!
Josh
We have members who are involved in sites that do in fact handle daily related news items.
In the current environment where the media is erroneously mis-categorizing and sensationalizing anything even remotely related to autonomous aircraft, we should use our discretion as to the content we feature here.
That being said, the member involved has been actively involved in our community and I do not see anything remotely discourteous or irreverent in his past profile.
It is unfortunate that he has taken such offence to moderation of his post, but given the wording of the reply, Mike has a right to feel this was insulting.
This is not about public relations. Someone got hurt by something that is also used for drones (blades, electricity, battery tech, blunt force trauma, this is not enough of a link to make the story newsworthy here. Helicopters over about six inches are dangerous. That much is true, and if its a drone, we talk about it... If not, let it be discussed at RC forums. By making this about "sending the wrong message" we make it a political or personal issue rather than simply about applying the rules. We sink to the place we don't want to be, politics, personalities, and move away from simple dispassionate rules.
Administrator is a title, acting as pronoun, for a specific member, TCIII (it's immaterial to me that he is a mod) and "stupid" is a pejorative adjective, this he is saying, grammatically and lexically that "Thomas is stupid," a statement that is not founded in fact and characterizes a member in a negative way. Saying "you are stupid" is both a personal attack and is uncivil.
That other members also demonstrate this abusive behavior is not a defense for breaking either rule.
You may feel it is of a lessor degree, or that it does not warrant action, and I can respect you even if I disagree. My view of the rules as they are written, it's ok to say "that's a stupid idea," or "that's a bloody studied thing to do" but it crosses the line when someone says "you are stupid" or "stupid Mike," as that characterizes the person, and is therefore a personal attack.
Where in the rules does it say the personal attack needs to be really vicious or needs to be obscene? And if it did, where is the line? Which is worse? Calling someone a moron, or just stupid? Does ignorant make the cut, or do they need to be a completely ignorant bastard? I believe that any phrase that takes the form "you are a ..." that does not end in a compliment is almost certainly a personal attack. This poster used the short form, a negatively connotated adjective modifying the noun that tokens for a clearly identified community member.
If these issues have not been addressed in the last it is because this esteemed group of moderators do not universally share a definition of what a personal attack is (ad hominim) We must realize that in a community of 38,000 members from a thousand different cultures and 800 different native languages, your guy feeling based on your native language is not sufficient to despise what is worse "stupid" or "crazy" or "f'ed up coconut-eating bastard" ... Moderators cannot decide which is "more" of a personal attack, nor can they know which is more uncivil for the poster, the target, or other readers. Fortunately the rules do not express that a degree of wrongness need be expressed, only that personal attacks are not tolerated. The uncivil is harder, as it involves culture-specific and situation-specific subjective standards.
But I respect your opposition. That you have considered my position here achieves my purpose: getting mods to think about what constitutes a personal attack, and why it is not for you to "feel" that the pejorative term is "mild" or "harsh," but rather to lexically or grammatically determine that the negative comment is about the person, not the issue. That crosses the line for me, I believe it should be used as the standard for all moderators.
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