A group for DIY Drones moderators to discuss best community management practices.
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:
- 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:
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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…
Read more…Scam???
Is this a scam, guy is posting on every group?http://diydrones.com/xn/detail/705844:Topic:2336557?xg_source=activity
Read more…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…
Read more…
Comments
@David, yes lets run the very first round again, the figure 8 I will post it now. FPV racing is all the rage it would be interesting to see if an autonomous flight could be faster.
I am getting plenty of messages from JJ and I see he has jumped onto the latest post from Chris. Still no actual video of an RPAS save from his parachute.
Best we watch out for him filling threads with my parachute is ace.
@David,
I think that the answer is pretty simple: Chris put forth a small list of candidate Moderators for us to review so he must have something in mind in relation to the Moderator Group.
TCIII
Also - is there going to be another T3 challenge? I'm getting a few questions about that as it's been around 5 months since the last.
Gents, my post a few below was serious... Whilst there was no specific question I still thought it would promote discussion, but let me phrase the question.
What has happened recently where we need additional moderators?
@Ruwan,
Thanks for the input, much appreciated.
TCIII
Bret C - +1
"Lazy" - +1
Visual Micro - +1
Mario - +0
my 2c.
Just throwing a thought up here.
So we have a bunch of mods that have been travelling or otherwise have had limited time for DIYDrones. They're still receiving the emails and acting where appropriate. Aside from the odd errant member add (which I still don't know how that happens) things seem to be going well and people aren't overworked and the site isn't challenging too much atm.
We used to post a note here when a blog or discussion was getting heated (and I still do but even those times seem to be less and less).
Or have I missed something?
@Hai Tran
Same here, Live in Canada, 14 flights in 12 days between 4 European countries and 4 different projects then back to Canada. no time for sleep or DIY drones. normal service is back for a few weeks once the brain catches up with the clock.!
@Gary,
Here is my review of the pared down original list of candidate Moderators from May 16th:
MarioSpeedwagon - just joined in Mar; needs more experience.
Visual Micro - has a significant number of posts; has been around for about five years; acceptable.
Bret C - quite a few posts; been around about eight years; acceptable.
Vladimir "Lazy" Khudyakov - experienced, but not a lot of posts; joined five years ago; maybe?
I am basing my opinion on both personal experience and how often they are on site.
TCIII
@Dwsgsparky that's not good enough, you arent connected to the net 24/7? ROFL just kidding. 2 weeks is way more reasonable deadline for roll calls.
I sometimes end up on minesites for a week on 12 hr shifts, less 2 hrs travel, 2 hrs meals, doesnt leave time to do anything other than sleep in the remaining 8 hrs.
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