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

Bill Bonney May 30, 2015 at 7:15am

I think the UAV Guide post should be deleted, they have no privacy policy on there site, no terms and conditions, no new content since last April, except the 5 Q&A posts of the new forum. They should really have put some efforts into populating that with data if they where serious.

I honestly think it's a scam site to get email/facebook etc.. contact list.

I think mods should check out links of blog posts before they posted, and make some check that the site is at least shows efforts in following normal operating procedures for what they are selling. It very easy to spot scam sites when you start checking for content, privacy policies, and T&Cs.
Moderator

Gary Mortimer May 30, 2015 at 4:14am

I think that's the last time we will allow the UAV guide. A cheeky re post of a previous
Admin

Morli May 29, 2015 at 11:31am

By look of it , the pilot was hanging/straddling on one of the booms and barely hanging on it :(), must have guts to sit in between 6 rotating swords for 1.5 mins :))
Moderator

Dean Wynton May 29, 2015 at 11:15am

Right its not a Tricopter nor a drone? and a very silly thing to do.. The next vid will probably be a flying mobility scooter once he loses his limbs
Moderator

Gary Mortimer May 29, 2015 at 11:11am

But its not a Tricopter!!! I say approve it. Its a dumb thing to do but folks will be interested.
Admin

Morli May 29, 2015 at 9:14am

TC,

Let him post this time but with note not to repost it agn.
Admin

Morli May 29, 2015 at 9:06am

not me TC
Moderator

Hai Tran May 29, 2015 at 8:55am

I might start referring to an Airbus A380 a manned drone too, it can land itself and fly waypoints too
Moderator

Hai Tran May 29, 2015 at 8:54am

Doesn't breach ToS does it? It is kinda interesting.

But I do think that manned drone kinda defeats the whole idea of drone being an unmanned system. Manned drone = Light rotary wing aircraft
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III May 29, 2015 at 8:49am

Here we go again Manned Drone

We have already had a post about the other Manned Drone. Do we need another one?

TCIII