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

Developer

Craig Elder March 13, 2014 at 11:41am

@Tom re Jared. I vote yes. It is useful information
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III March 13, 2014 at 8:54am

Looks like Jared took our advice and decided to post his tutorial here in his new, awaiting blog post:Telemetry tutorial

Should it be approved now?

TCIII
Moderator

David Anders March 12, 2014 at 7:10pm

Tom,

If he wants it posted, he posts it here and not use diyd as a redirector.
Developer

Craig Elder March 12, 2014 at 6:57pm

I like the info. We were talking about this on the dev call on Monday night. It would be great to have somebody repost the whole post on diy rather than link offsite
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III March 12, 2014 at 6:51pm

@Mark,

You got your wish. We have a waiting blog post by Jared Redbow that essential redirects the reader to the CADDrone.com site for a telemetry tutorial: CadDrones

I believe that it should be returned to the author.

What is the consensus?

TCIII
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III March 12, 2014 at 3:48pm

@Mark,

That sounds like a very good idea.

TCIII
Moderator

Mark Harrison March 12, 2014 at 2:21pm

Yep, I think we're about to the point where we start not approving CAD Drones postings without a moderator consensus. The 3D printed quad is really good work, but I think that's the 3rd time it's been featured in a blog post.
Moderator

Michael Pursifull March 12, 2014 at 11:01am

And I would say, don't "focus" on cad drones (and I don't think anyone is actually doing that, however we've deceived it) and focus on the even and fair application of the ToS.
Moderator

Michael Pursifull March 12, 2014 at 11:00am

Traffic transfer isn't a problem; many great blogs and news stories capture visitors away from the site, and that's ok. But so far cad drones blog posts, by JJ or Jarod, haven't meet the ToS. Focus on the ToS, is my position.
Moderator

Ruwan March 12, 2014 at 9:39am

@Sgt Ric, TCIII,

I also feel like that's what he think.