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

Dean Wynton December 22, 2015 at 3:49am

Personally I don't believe it is appropriate at all.
Moderator

Hai Tran December 22, 2015 at 3:45am

Is posting that judgement order appropriate on this site?
Moderator

Dean Wynton December 21, 2015 at 11:31pm

Yes a little odd.. I expect he must already be aware of it but he was being "named and shamed" although I feel it is somewhat unfair as he may in fact be innocent even though the judgement has been made as it may have been done without his knowledge had he not received the notification by post?
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III December 21, 2015 at 6:37pm

@Bill,

What a way to serve a Court Judgement:-)

TCIII
Developer

Bill Bonney December 21, 2015 at 5:02pm

looks like DIYD is now a "you've been served' service http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/show?id=705844%3ABlogPost%3A2105...
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III December 19, 2015 at 5:17am

@Randy,

No problem.

TCIII
Developer

Randy December 18, 2015 at 7:45pm

Yes, approved now, hope that's ok. Normally I don't approve blog posts.. but I was excited about this one and couldn't resist. I won't make a habit of it though!
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III December 18, 2015 at 6:49pm

@Randy,

It looks like Paul's blog post meets the TOS requirements now.

TCIII
Developer

Randy December 18, 2015 at 5:41pm

Re Paul's copter toss blog post, I've asked him if he can upload the videos to youtube and then move them to the very top of the blog post above any other words. So he's doing that now.
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III December 18, 2015 at 1:40pm

@Sgt_Ric, Hope that things are going better for you!

@Gary/Sgt_Ric, Yes, the fact that she had joined the Higeria-NASRDA caught my eye too. Also the fact that her statement about FPV video in the MP HUD is pretty much well known on this website.

TCIII