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?

David Chouinard is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with David Chouinard and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and m…

Comments

Moderator

Brian July 9, 2013 at 8:53pm

Of two current pending membership requests, one is from China, the other... Some else's opinion please.

Thanks
Moderator

Sgt Ric July 9, 2013 at 3:38pm

Facebook page for David Chouinard

David Chouinard

David Chouinard is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with David Chouinard and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and m…
Moderator

Sgt Ric July 9, 2013 at 2:21pm

Member DavidChouinard has not posted yet, but gives Montreal as his hometown, but lives in Houston Texas.

The web site IP Address 67.205.38.45. Davidchouinard.com through New Dream Network, LLC in Brea, CA, United States.

Of course these IPs might simply be the web hosting or ISPs he is going through.
Moderator

Sgt Ric July 9, 2013 at 2:08pm

About Autistic:

1) the odds of another member of this same community having a close IP is astronomical. Even if it is spoofed.

2) For someone who only joined yesterday, Autistic sure jumped right in.

3) I hadn't realized "our friend" was Canadian... Anyone remember any posts to that effect? (or is that just due to a proxy?)
Moderator

Mark Harrison July 9, 2013 at 12:34pm

re: the video embedding

that's been posted at least 3 times...

http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blog/list?q=Raffaello

It must be nice having such an easily searchable name!
Moderator

Ruwan July 9, 2013 at 10:59am

TCIII, I tried to embed as well. Some how NING is removing the iframe.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson July 9, 2013 at 7:30am

John: Sounds like our old troublemaking friend. Watch for bad behavior.
Moderator

Nathaniel Caner July 8, 2013 at 3:39pm

Must have been. I went back and forth twice between the main page and the blog moderation page with no change then a minute later there was a new blog on the front page, so someone must have beat me to it.

Regards,

Nathaniel ~KD2DEY
Moderator

Mark Harrison July 8, 2013 at 3:36pm

Nathaniel, maybe somebody moderated or cancelled the post by the time you got to it?
Moderator

Nathaniel Caner July 8, 2013 at 2:18pm

The main page shows that there is a blog waiting for approval,however when I go to the management page, it says I'm done moderating! Is anyone else seeing the same thing,or is it just me?

Nathaniel ~KD2DEY