A group for DIY Drones moderators to discuss best community management practices.

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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:

  1. Does the post start with an image/video or at least have one very close to the top?
  2. Are videos embedded? (Not a link to a video elsewhere)
  3. 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?

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Comments

  • Moderator
    @Morli, I see your point, and agree.
  • Admin

    Thanks TC.

    Sgt,  

    A public bus driver "meaning well" drives his vehicle wrong direction in a one way road which  would deliver his passengers faster to their destination would equate to current JJ blog's intention IMHO. This blog's intent was not even hidden/subtle. Is he becoming bolder  assuming we as team are becoming weak and inert in making our decisions? Good intention alone does not justify the final result and this blog  blatantly violates  DiyDrone  community's passion and  TOS IMHO

    Cheers

  • Moderator

    I know what you mean... he was one of us after all.

    He just seems to approach things a little differently than most of us.

    He is nothing like those trolls we have had like DS, and company, and he seems to mean well.

  • Moderator
    Like many of you, I feel awful even raising questions like this about JJ's post. I am certain he feels persecuted. However, I am satisfied that I would raise the exact same question irrespective of the author, and my conscience is (almost entirely) clear (the only residual being that I know he must feel attacked, even though I know that to be false.)
  • Moderator
    I suggest a rephrase: an OP may edit his post after approval. At which point there is 1) a published original copy and 2) a pending edited copy. I believe deleting the pending edit (which looks just like any pending article) will delete the post entirely (that is, it does not publish the update, and it removed the original)

    I haven't tested this, but based on the workflow for updating content, I believe this to be the case.

    As such, we have in the last unwittingly deleted edited/updated articles thinking that they were repeats.

    I have no specific knowlwedge of this incident, but I would tend to suspect that he didn't resubmit, but instead edited (of course he could have done either.)

    One note, which most of you already know, one of the editable items is the date/time, and some OPs will edit and change the date/time to "now" which brings that original-now-edited article forward. It will no longer appear in its originally published location, but will instead be top page.
    Case AS
  • Admin

    @Morli,

    Yes, JJ deleted and then resubmitted his CADDrones.com blog post. You deleted the resubmitted one that was waiting for approval.

    TCIII

  • Admin

    Guys,

    Did some one approve JJ's  crowd funded 3D printer  blog and was it seen in front page few hours ago or was it only available in "for approval blog" list?  It seems like it was approved from comments below yet I just saw it  "for approval" few minutes ago which I deleted based on all of your feed back. Does it mean that he submitted it again?  thanks 

  • Admin

    I was in the process of sending JJ's blog post back to him when it suddenly disappeared. I guess he pulled it on his own?

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    3701665141?profile=original

  • Admin

    @Gary,

    Yes, he has retimed his original post to make it current. What do the Moderators think? Should we send it back to him for not meeting the TOS as has been previously suggested?

    Comments?

    TCIII

This reply was deleted.
100KM

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…

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Developer

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…

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3 Replies