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.
More instructions:
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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
The airship blog should not have been approved for several reasons...
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/rc-airship-as-drone
No photo, not really news worthy, etc.
Certainly not front page material.
Hi Guys
Sorry if I got in the way for Darius, Newbie moderator error, wont happen again.
I'm glad I'm not the first to notice the airship post. If something is really cool and without an image I will go off an get one to add. That airship post is not really interesting enough. As soon as someone comments its impossible to pull that sort of post. Why you ask, well folks just scream censorship. You will find out if you re around long enough that the mods get blamed for far more than they should!
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I say delete it on a 'three-agree' basis. Say that I did it, I can take the heat :)
-Bo
Whatever else we do wrt Darius Jack, let's (a) not apologize for other people, and (b) not have a policy on inclusivity/disability/special learning.
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Hi, I agree that there should not have to be a policy for any certain groups too. I don't think there should be a need for black awareness month, for example - we should all just be smooth and even on the field.
But, in a tech forum, it's quite difficult to discern between a chatterbot A.I, and learning needs (aspergers for example) where a moderator has to eventually make a decision on the member. Using turing test techniques doesn't always work out due to it's known Weaknesses of Testing, the A.I bots have been developed to ignore questioning for example, which is what we are experiencing with Darius too.
I think that some things can be improved upon to help disability & learning needs members, a CAPTCHA system could be used to prevent chatterbots from posting easily.
A little bit of compromise & understanding on the conflict between chatbot A.I and asperger's by learning needs members would be a big help towards helping us figure out a set of tools to assist us in separating chatbots from real people.
I also think that more awareness from members (as a whole), towards not abusing genuine members with genuine intentions would help, and they too could do with a little bit of understanding and compromise regarding patience and understanding.
Best wishes, thanks for debate
- Bo
P.S - sorry for adding to your post, we could make a discussion page if you wish to?
I'm not sure who approved the RC airship blog....I was going to delete it and send him a message about adding a photo to the header, but didn't know if that was appropriate after it's been posted.
Note to new mods, we don't approve military projects. Which is what the Bolivian thing is. I will leave it there as people have seen it. In future nothing that mentions the military. There are developers that would be upset to think the military are using their code.
Mario has the right approach, we do tend to be carrot rather than stick. KF was a barrel of laughs! Anyhoo if members fed the troll less. If he does not get the attention he craves he will go.
Okay I understand. skill sets are a varied thing, trying to keep them as best one can. Probation it is, please update us as and when you get anywhere (or not). Perhaps the next few days will determine if there is a change, if not then make the cut. cheers.
I'm not too optimistic about Darius, but I'd rather take a probation approach than suspension.
If he's oblivious to social cues, then we need to spell it out for him and give him a chance to fix the problems, imo
Okay, thanks. I'm happy to suspend him, but Mario please do it as you've gotten there first. Perhaps notify here when it's done.
Best wishes, be safe in your bunker Chris :)
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