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
Vayu is another user of Pixhawk and ArduPilot but that post would only have value if it actually was talking about what they are doing with the autopilot
This one doesn't really feel front page worthy? http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/vayu-aircraft-drone-company
Keeping with tradition... I'm one of nature's tinkerers, age 4 I dismantled my new bike just to understand it and I've not finished dismantling things yet. Occasionally I build something useful, more often I make things that interest me and then file them away or donate them.
I've been playing with RC stuff since around 2000 when I started building nitro car kits, just because. I then got into quads off the back of the purchase of the little Hubsan x4 for my daughter and almost immediately started tinkering with it. After lurking on a few discussions here decided I had to DIY something and the journey started. I'm now onto DIY multirotor number 6 plus I own a few Hubsan x4s (3 I think) a Quanum venture from Hobby King and a generic £25 quad I found in Costco.
Unlike most of you guys I have no real application for my toys I just don't think I've ever grown up properly :)
Outside RC I enjoy the outdoors, walking, climbing, cycling, I do a lot of target shooting, some fishing, camping etc. Indoors I like playing with lathes turning big pieces of metal into big piles of shavings, I have a mini collection of model engineering lathes and mills, some CNC some manual. I tinker with electronics here and there too. Oh and I work as an IT contractor
Thanks Bill, RM, Bo: Good call on that post and it's great to see the new mods getting dialed in. But I have to confess that it was me who approved that post (without reading it!). My bad. Just clicking too fast on my phone while walking and talking ;-)
The 'email gathering' posts are just a pattern of type of blog posts that come up time to time on this site.
I would always be wary of post that is a first time user with only one post. If the name of the poster is a website, not a real name (I think all members should be real names, not we addresses, but thats another argument). Or the post isn't signed of by somebody with a real name.
That when you verify that the links in the post are valid, that the linked sites are what they say they are, and actually look real. Check the about page to see if they check out.
@Bill I agree, who's approving these lately? Seems there's lots of posts being approved without checking these past 10 days.
re: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/utilising-drones-for-the-benefi...
This post doesn't pass the 'smell' test and looks like it's just out to gather email and phone numbers. It should have not been posted. Seriously, its a Video Library Website that doesn't have one video as an example on the website?
Google Cached Version
I've pulled it, if it comes back they need to show some more useful info into what they are actually doing.
Mario: Thank, done
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