Moderators

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:

Guidelines

When is a blog not a blog?

Comments

Moderator

Brian May 11, 2013 at 11:44pm

I'm here...
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III May 11, 2013 at 5:18pm

Based on a discussion with Josh Johnson as to why Tim Green made his public censorship statement, I have sent Tim this pm:

"Hi Tim,

I believe that Josh Johnson made a reasonable request concerning your blog post and your public response to his request that "this DIYDrones website is tightly controlled and censored" violates the TOS and requires me to suspend you, however I will overlook it this time. Maybe, as you have said, you would be better off posting on RC Groups if you feel that the "DIY Drones website is tightly controlled and censored"?

Regards,

TCIII Admin
Joshua Johnson May 11, 2013 at 5:01pm

I think Tim Green is upset because he requested to post a blog yesterday that was just a picture and very little information and I sent him a nice message asking him to add more content (like a video of how he did it) etc or post it in the forums section. I will forward you the message I sent him Tom And Gary.
Moderator

Gary Mortimer May 11, 2013 at 9:50am

I did the same Thomas, we can't be fairer than that. I don't believe too much heavy handed censorship happens here, if it did I would be off!
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III May 11, 2013 at 8:33am

@Gary,

I have no idea, that is why I asked Tim to be specific about what post, discussion, etc had been unfairly edited or censored. I have not censored or edited any post in the last couple of days except for editing video blog posts so they show correctly on the web site.

I have pmed Tim to explain his statement and the basis for making such a statement.

TCIII
Moderator

Gary Mortimer May 11, 2013 at 8:19am

What caused Tim Green to protest? Anybody know?
Zach Bayne May 9, 2013 at 9:43pm

still here.
Moderator

Ruwan May 9, 2013 at 3:34pm

I'm here.
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III May 9, 2013 at 1:54pm

@Nathaniel,

I believe the additional moderator is Joshua Ott, the Editorial Director, who was originally not a moderator, but is now a moderator.

TCIII
Moderator

Mark Harrison May 9, 2013 at 1:53pm

@TC, understood. I'm just sharing the perceptions from the receiving side.