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.
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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
I think Dean is spot on in his assessment of the purposes of that post. No information. Just a feeder to the dronelife site. I move to vote it off the island.
@Dean,
Nice analysis. This is what Gary and I have in mind when we request comments from the Moderators on controversial blog posts prior to approving them.
TCIII
I don`t really find it that interesting a read, nothing that I don`t already know or cannot be found on any news sites and secondly links to his site is a known SEO ploy. Basically he is trying to gain rank in google search using DIY drones as a medium with the non informative post
@Gary,
The blog post you have linked needs a graphic/picture/video/etc. in the post header and Andrew should know better as he has three blog posts under his belt.
He does present some pertinent analysis of sUAS community trends which might be useful to the more commercially oriented members on the website. We have to remember that some blog posters have agendas some of which are good and some suspect.
I say send it back to edit it to Guideline requirements and see what he does.
TCIII
This one is just fishing to pull people into his site http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/6-reasons-the-market-for-drone-... should we allow it?
Love that Bill, thanks. Growing up my dad worked in a factory and I always thought he did this when the day ended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myDAkp7UpxQ For those that didn't get the first reference....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6YE4PCRNwc
And finally my avatar, I like him because he could whistle and make the wind come. Something very handy when I was ballooning more and did not want to fly because like Windy I would rather have been drinking cider.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d27hPy38EyI
They don't make childrens programs proper no more.
You may now return to your normal programming.
@Mark,
Two out of three times when I ask for comments on a controversial blog post that is awaiting approval there is not a peep out of any of the Moderators. So I have to decide for myself about the fate of the blog post without any kind of consensus from the Moderators.
TCIII
TC, what would you like more help with? I see the queues are mostly running at 0.
checking in...
Present and accounted for... (Quote is just for Gary) Though I operate more in the role of developer, I do bring up topics for discussion here as an when I see them.
(Yet to go rogue, the dark side is strong... use the the source, Luke!) ;-)