Rosalind - 3:56 pm on Jul 11, 2007 (gmt 0)

I often wondered why they didn't "fix" this. Let's face it, 99% of "listed" deeplinks are added by an editor (wild guess), not by the submission process. I never quite understood why the "system" allows people to submit their site/url to 10K categories if they wanted to, along with each individual page. This would save an enormous amount of time and system resources by "fixing" this single issue. Maybe they have already fixed this or improved the backend in some way and I don't know about it.

It's almost certainly down to a lack of automated solutions, and I can only imagine that this is a political decision rather than one based on not having the capabilities.

For instance, it's quite easy to filter submissions and grade them according to the likelihood that they have followed the guidelines. You can examine a number of things in a submission from the category, the text, the domain extension and it's likely suitability for that category, numbers of previous submissions, whether it's a deep link, and so on. Then you sort the submissions in the order of least spam, so that those submissions that look okay to the script get priority. The more factors that go into this, the better it works, much like a SE algorithm. It's surprising how effective such an approach can be.