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

Moderator

Mark Harrison August 11, 2014 at 8:46pm

It seems reasonable to expect moderators to check this forum regularly. Even a busy day is rarely more than a page of new posts.

I'm tempted to agree with David... suspend the non-responding moderators for the time being, and add them back in if it makes sense (maybe someone's off on summer holiday, for example). I think we've got the time zones pretty well covered with the existing crew.
Moderator

Hai Tran August 11, 2014 at 7:15pm

All moderators should be aware what constitutes a blog post, whether or not they answer a roll call or not. Either someone just doesn't care, or sometimes mistakes are made. Just get on with it a fix the problem and not over complicate things.
Moderator

Hai Tran August 11, 2014 at 7:14pm

Maybe the most simple solution is that when a blog this is missing the appropriate content is published, and a moderate identifies that it shouldn't have been published, does there moderator thing and deletes the blog post and tells the author why. Problem fixed. Requires less effort than having a big chit chat on the moderator forum as is the case right now.
Moderator

Nathaniel Caner August 11, 2014 at 6:52pm

Is it just me or does it seem a bit silly that we need a moderator to moderate the moderators??

Maybe it's just me......
Moderator

David Anders August 11, 2014 at 6:47pm

I would go the next step and SUSPEND their mod privilege. It should be a condition of modding that people regularly check this group.
Moderator

John Church August 11, 2014 at 6:37pm

Yeah, maybe the mods in question don't check this group and an email needs to go out.
Moderator

David Anders August 11, 2014 at 6:04pm

So what's happening with the others?

It's annoying if questions are being asked here and the person responsible doesn't respond. /:
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III August 11, 2014 at 5:20pm

@David,

As far as I can tell only the "usual suspects" responded and that it about it.

I think Gary knows more.

TCIII
Moderator

David Anders August 11, 2014 at 5:15pm

It's still damn annoying. Did everyone respond to the roll call? I didn't see everyone.
Moderator

Sgt Ric August 11, 2014 at 4:20pm

..and you are both doing a great job!

You are right, not much gets by you guys for long.