RichTC - 10:31 am on Dec 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

I agree with having stats on the dmoz pages about how many await review, how many have been rejected etc etc. To clean up the poor image that DMOZ has, it needs to be vastly more transparant than it is currently.

If sludge and spam are such a problem for dmoz then they should make it a fee paying directory imo. They only get zillions of submissions because its free.

If a webmaster had to pay a fee for a review in the same way that a webmaster has to with Yahoo.com and business.com then that would kill spam and sludge submissions overnight. The site gets reviewed and is either included or declined for what ever reason, but its processed all the same.

It would also make dmoz possibly a viable business rather than a liablity?

The only thing i would add to this is that if they went down this route that they:-

a) made sure that it was ONE entry only for a site in the most relevent section of dmoz - This then removes sites an editor favours getting multi listings ( we see too much of this and this leeds to questions over editor bias)

b) that each sector was checked and sites that no longer work, under construction, outdated descriptions were updated, removed, adjusted etc to improve quality control. If editors were employed following introduction of charges they could then do this.

c) Editors had a policy of mutual respect for webmasters and work harder at improving communications with webmasters. ie some of the replies ive seen to webmasters in resource zone for example border on being insulting imo and this isnt an image that a quality facility should be projecting currently esp as its part of the respected AOL/ Time Warner group.