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
@Brian,
You will have to ask Josh Ott, the Editorial Director, about that. I think that waiting blog posts do generate emails, but that discussion post definitely do and maybe that is what Michael is referring to?
TCIII
@TC is there something you can check? I'll check my spam filter, but I do that fairly regular so think it's not filtering anything from Drones...
Here they are:
http://diydrones.com/group/ardurover-user-group/forum/topic/show?id...
http://diydrones.com/group/ardurover-user-group?commentId=705844%3A...
His original blog was longer, he basically repeated himself, and used more "u r" language, more spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization errors. I'm glad you missed it. It seems like you had a more interesting time, as a result.
I deleted a few waiting blog posts yesterday because they were just asking why the Wikis were not working. Then there were a couple of waiting blog posts that had no graphic/picture/video/etc in the header and were just a few short sentences with links to other website. I sent those back to the authors asking for more details and a graphic/picture/video/etc to be placed in the post header.
I did not see the lawn mower blog post, but I did receive an email notification that it was waiting approval.
TCIII
No idea on the lawn mower post... But yes, there are lots of notifications coming up but very few seem to go through to the front page?
I've also seen some interesting blog titles through email notification. I was also curious, why they didn't go through to the front page. Does ning sends out email notifications if an old blog post changed by author?
Quick question. I was curious If anyone knew what was wrong with the blog request titled ArduRover as a lawn mower? I never actually got to read the blog I just noticed it in my email and was curious if anyone had any idea why it wasn't approved. I'm not questioning anyone I'm just super curious because the title sounds interesting.
@Michael,
Yes, that is the original video that Jerry posted.
TCIII
"There's a lot of controversy about high altitude flights! Several
people jumped in about that (same thing happened to Larry) but this one
was getting worse fast. I tried to jump in and save him but I don't know
If John thought I helped or not.
I created a group on DIY Drones called Ardupilot Space Program and I
hope to have a safe place to present the work done by Larry and John in
a safer way. I guess we will see how it goes. I'll take the bashing
building the group and see how well it calms down.
Then perhaps we will have a place to present the good work done by
everyone. John removed it himself disgusted at the flury that was
beginning.
Larry did the same thing with at least one of his post and I think he
snuck it back in off the main blog.
A lot of people don't know the true FAA regulations and they think
Circular 97 is law but it's not law it's a guideline. As it stands
today.
It can cause a real rucus and I think the only way to fix it is to just
go ahead and post in the group I created things I do and then make it
safe for others. I've been taking it on the chin for what we do for a
long time it wont bother me.
In other words I'll drop my SkyFun next and I'll take the flack after
that hopefully John and Larry will feel safer posting. Then we can point
back to the great work Larry and John did before what I'm about to do.
I think I can present it in a safe manner and hopefully just make the
truth know and get it over with! I guess we will see how it goes. I
don't have any fear of the FAA coming to get me. Because I fly radar
reflectors I stay under the waiver limits and we have never had any
trouble getting a NOTAM or a waiver when we need it.
You don't need one for what Larry or John did as long as you stay under
7.5 lbs for the aircraft. You have to fly a radar reflector (we always
fly a corner reflector) And the craft has to be the entire balloon
payload. You can't drop something from something else.
I did notice that neither Larry or John seemed to fly a reflector. That
would be a sticking point but I'm not sure they didn't.
Monroe"
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