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

  • Developer

    @Gary fool, don't you know, only Darius knows! you will see the light!

    Classic troll in training.

    Has an interesting github site https://github.com/manta103g/PhilipsHueRealTime

    Seems like a way to troll github as well

    manta103g/PhilipsHueRealTime
    PhilipsHueRealTime stays for real-time controller and application for Philips Hue LED Lighting - manta103g/PhilipsHueRealTime
  • Admin

    @Gary,

    Good words of wisdom.

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    I'm keeping out of whatever Darius Jack says, nobody will ever win he is always right and will get bored and be gone in a couple of months.

  • Admin

    @Nathaniel,

    Here if you have not already seen it.

    I went to submarine school at New London in the early 70s, but only stayed there a month as the training period was very short.

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    Hey All,

    Hope everyone had a happy holiday adn a Happy New Year! I dropped off the radar for a bit while I helped my son and his family move across the country from San Diego to New London, CT. We drove across country starting December 26th and ran into Goliath en-route! had to make a massive 600+ mile detour to avoid the foul weather! It cost us 2 days travel and some frayed nerves in the process. Some 3200+ mile later we arrived none the worse for wear and my son now prepares for his new duty station.

    Did I miss anything significant?

    Regards,

    Nathaniel ~KD2DEY

  • Moderator

    Nice detective work... important to remember this exploit/feature.

  • Admin

    @Bill,

    Good work!

    TCIII

  • Developer

    Did you guys see this post http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/hoperf-trp-project-targeting-marc... about 3DR Radio hacking.

    What's interesting was a link to an annoying mp3 at the bottom of the post (other than the annoying use of HTML formatting ;-) Anyway, I removed the link to the audio, since it means that anybody who looks at the post will have sent unwittingly their IP address to the same persons googlex.co.uk website. I'm sure we all don't need to be tracked inadvertently. If their intentions are good, why would they care?

  • Admin

    @Gary/Bill,

    According to the membership database FusionFlight left voluntarily.

    Maybe a little thin skinned?

    TCIII

  • Moderator

    I asked him or her to open the comments up, I certainly didn't delete the account!

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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1 Reply
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