The_Contractor - 11:20 am on Jul 12, 2007 (gmt 0)

It wouldn't solve editors' problems.

It certainly would help when some editors internet connections time-out trying to edit in categories where the unreviewed queue is full of duplicate submissions and deeplinks.

True Story: Last winter a company contacted me about doing some development. I took on and completed the project. They asked me to look at another of their clients' site and try to solve the problems they were having ranking etcetera and "why we can’t get into DMOZ". Nothing wrong with the 6-year old site meeting DMOZ requirements as it was a legitimate manufacturing business (no ecommerce). They had been religiously submitting every 3-months to five different categories of dmoz under Shopping for over three years. After a lengthy explanation of how DMOZ works I went to look for the correct category and found a perfect match under a small "subcategory" of Top: Business: Industrial Goods and Services: Factory Automation. Guess what, they were listed there....

I think a simple notification upon trying to submit the site would have gone a long way in curbing what in many cases is considered submission spam. This development company followed this same mentality with their other clients and had a decent size client base. They later told me they found four other clients sites listed in other categories they were unaware of....

The above is simply a case of where people do not read the submission guidelines, and even when they do they figure if example.com can have "1460 deeplinks" why can’t their site have five or six or ten... You cannot expect submitters to understand what even many editors have problems with...can you?

It would do a great deal to solve professional spammers' single biggest problem

Please explain as that is a pretty broad statement.... How could the following quote from my other message help spammers with their submissions?

A simple "I’m sorry, the URL you suggested has already been suggested for review in CategoryName" or "I’m sorry the URL you suggested is already listed in CategoryName". This would solve multiple problems which all stem from multiple submissions.

even if it was one way to solve a problem we really had.

So the problem I’m speaking of doesn’t even exist......denial of problems will never solve them.

I hope my comments are not misconstrued as attacking dmoz or the editors in any way.