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
With Concern to the Testing things and fiddling with the settings. We are going to use this time to get to know the Ning Moderator Settings a little better and play around with settings and create test accounts to fiddle around with Moderator Settings/Perks and see how our settings and changes affect our Moderator test accounts and other Administrative Groups
Sorry guys I was in a rush to get to work and didn't clarify 100% on what's going on. The Main objective in this is for Tom and I to get some usable data for research purposes to better DIYDrones. For example we want to get data on Membership Requests (How many Legit requests Vs. Spammers), Moderator Workload, and also lay some better Moderator Guidelines and Protocols on Key Issues that have been dividing the Team effort. The reason we have to have you guys stand down for a week is because without Ning 2.0 allowing us to backlog when you guys deny a spammer or do Moderator work on the site its hard to get real usable data on how big the moderator workload is and our membership ratios that we want. The role call is because If people aren't checking this group regularly blogs and other such issues that Moderator are still working on are getting approved or denied before a consensus is reached which Tom and I believe is linked to a moderator who isn't checking this group and just is doing their own thing which can ruin the Team Work in this group if someone isn't following along in here.
Wha? A little more information please. What do you mean by "testing things out and fiddling with the settings"? What's the objective here boys? A little transparency with the moderator crew would be very welcome.
To quote my good friend Bill...
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark".
Hello Everyone! May 9th (Today) starting around 8-11AM CST Tom and I are doing some experimentation and testing of the Moderator Settings. During this time none of you will be able to approve or deny blogs or membership requests while we are testing things out and fiddling with the settings. This Test is going to Last 5-7 Days!! During this time can you please stay active in the community and continue to help out members who need assistance. During this downtime we are also going to be doing a Moderator Role Call to help improve the Moderator Team even more if need be. If there's anything that needs Moderation Please Contact Tom or I and we will do our best to handle any issues that you can't handle without your Moderator Powers. If you have any questions you can post on here or contact me via Message.
Here's some news from Ning about their spam-fighting plans. Sound encouraging.
http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/ning-spring-cleaning-begins-t...
Hey just a suggestion. Add "power" to "Engines/Motors/props" i have been putting battery and ESC questions in there as well.
Whilst you may not be able to think of any reasons, I wouldn't think it suspicious. I was actually thinking about this not so long ago and going distances that would exceed TX and telemetry ranges. Of course, you could also just hop onto the mobile network and then you shouldn't lose coverage, but still even that would be shady in parts of the Australian outback.
I'm not that worried about it, but it is suspicious. Worth keeping an eye on, at least. For someone. Not me.
@Michael,
What makes you feel that this is a suspicious post?
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