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 16, 2013 at 11:06pm

Yes I would like to remain a moderator, but I don't see that I have any privileges.
Joshua Johnson May 16, 2013 at 11:03pm

@Brian do you want to remain a moderator? Or would you like to be released? I can't really tell by your comment?
Moderator

Brian May 16, 2013 at 10:32pm

I like helping, I have since, well a long time. I'd like to continue to help, but it seems that I have lost my mojo...
Joshua Johnson May 16, 2013 at 8:01pm

I'm slowing reinstating people at this time. David Anders, Mark, and a few others should find that your powers are reinstated!
Joshua Johnson May 16, 2013 at 3:08pm

Hey Everyone,

Thanks for being patient everyone during this process. I'm working on some final touches so you should see your moderator powers reinstated in the next 4-6 Hours.

Best Wishes,

Joshua Johnson
Moderator

Sgt Ric May 16, 2013 at 7:36am

"...Admin staff.."?

Tom, who does that cover?

I thought it was just you and your sidekick Josh.
Moderator
Mark Harrison May 15, 2013 at 6:46pm
I'm hoping we can hurry up and go back to full moderator involvement. I'm seeing these two bad effects of the current tests:
- slow approval of posts. we used to see very quick turnaround with many eyes watching the queue.
- now the posts seem to be batching up, and approved all at once. this means some posts start off several positions down and below the fold.
Moderator

Nathaniel Caner May 15, 2013 at 2:14pm

Coming up on a week with the reduced Moderator involvement....do you have anything to report on the Admin/Site activities over the past week?

Regards,

Nathaniel ~KD2DEY
Moderator

Graham Dyer May 14, 2013 at 9:07am

Hi, I'm still here (as requested:))
Moderator

Ruwan May 13, 2013 at 7:35pm

I see few javascript errors in swfobject script (for flash).