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

  • Admin

    too many BD. 

  • Moderator

    I guess there will be more spammers tomorrow. There is a Cricket World Cup Final match held in Bangladesh.
    BTW, hope our team (Sri Lanka) will win tomorrow :-). 

  • Admin

    A lot of new member attempts from Bangladesh today:-) Based on the profile information, I wonder if they understand English or are they just working off of Q cards?

    TCIII

  • Admin

    @Gary,

    I approved him as the profile looked acceptable. Goes to show you never can tell. I also suspended a spammer (Alex Williams) this morning that had a reasonable looking profile:-)

    This one may be a potential spammer (Bangladesh): Link

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    Cliff Cole had a very convincing profile with appropriate pictures. The funsies and bombing was the warning

    About Me:
    Grew up in the states, now a high school student in China, been in almost every field of the hobby, flown for 3 years. Building a UAV as a school project. Looking forward to a higher education in the states
    Please tell us a bit about your UAV interest
    I want to build a large fixed wing UAV that can reliably operate in city environments. Maybe some funsies like bombing or aerial fireworks launching
    Hometown:
    Rochester, MN
  • Moderator
    Sports spammer Marie Markle:
    Please tell us a bit about your UAV interest
    interested in the process manufacturing of personal drones and would like to know more and more about their development.
    Hometown:
    Atlanta, GA
  • Moderator
    Anyone want to publish, with your analysis or commentary?
    http://gpsworld.com/glonass-gone-then-back/
  • Admin

    @Gary,

    For some reason the SACAA logo picture in this blog post's header will not display: SACAA when posted. Do you have a jpg of the SACAA logo that can be substituted?

    Never mind. I finally got it to appear:-)

    TCIII

  • Moderator
    User Robiho Hermission was another sports spammer.
    http://diydrones.com/profile/RobihoHermision?xg_source=activity
    Suspended.
    Watch these people who give a New York address and include UAV photo and Lidar as one of their likes.
  • Moderator

    I think the skateboard launch video is fine for the main feed, since it's novel and interesting.

    I would kick his ass though for putting in a playlist of all his skating videos rather than just the skateboard launch video.

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