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

  • Moderator

    Sorry to hear you were in hospital, the lovely Sonia is a real estate agent...

     Établies dans différents environnements (villageois ou urbain), les maisons « Les Senioriales » s'avèrent spécialement imaginées pour offrir un environnement charmant et empli de convivialité aux habitants. De plus, tout au long du développement des concepts, la société vise à améliorer les conditions de vie des retraités à travers des habitations sans marches avec salle d'eau ergonomique, rangements fonctionnels, etc.

  • Moderator

    I had another look at Sonia's page since the comment was made that she could be a potential spammer, and I see that she is also a member of the Nigeria-NASRDA group... does this seem unusual?

    /group/nigeria-nasrda

    (just trying to catch up after being in hospital for the last month)

  • 3D Robotics

    Sorry, my bad. I didn't notice that it had been posted before. 

  • Admin

    How many times are we going to advertise the Seagull Camera Trigger on the front page?

    This Seagull Camera Trigger blog post is from Aug 7th.

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    It is a little odd? but I suppose until she/he crosses the line they isn`t much reason to take any action

  • Admin

    This new member:

    3702143430?profile=original

    Seems to know what she is talking about, but her Profile Bio says differently.

    I think that she is a potential spammer.

    Comments?

    TCIII

  • Admin

    @Gary,

    It is getting harder to find really unique and newsworthy DIY subjects for blog posts. Also there seems to be a trend towards less and less basic blog post projects and "how to's" and more high end ones that seem to be very technical or more RTR oriented.

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    Its awfully quiet...

  • Admin

    Hi Craig,

    Thanks for the input and observations. Much appreciated.

    TCIII

  • Developer

    I think that is a good question to ask Tom.

    The story is about two vehicles that are used by both civilians and military in a non military application.  I think the key point to evaluate is the non military application and it fits the criteria for interesting to the community but it is not very DIY. The answer would be clear if the K-max was in civilian livery.

    I have seen it elsewhere but I vote post it.

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