gpmgroup - 9:02 pm on Jul 16, 2007 (gmt 0)

gpmgroup, I've spent quite a bit of time (over the past few years) thinking about something like what you suggest. But ... we have to face the facts: it's a solution looking for a problem.

There is a huge problem with DMOZ.

Lets take an example site

We suggested a site over 4 years ago, This is a site is for a company over 100 years old has 11 offices employs over 100 people and manages 750,000 acres of the UK. (There is no advertising / mirrors / affiliates – Single site for a single UK company with a .co.uk domain registered 1999 & The site is currently averaging 1 million visitors a year.)

Nearly four years ago - Six months after submission. We were told the site had been moved by a “Meta editor concentrating primarily on the UK sections of the directory.” to the category above the one we submitted to.

We waited and waited quietly keeping an eye on the categories from time to time.

Earlier this year we followed your advice here in this forum after the DMOZ rebuild form the crash and resubmitted to the higher category. (Even though I personally still feel the site sits more naturally in the category below which we originally submitted to. But hey if the “Meta editor concentrating primarily on the UK sections of the directory.” Says it should be in the category above….)

The categories concerned have both been edited since that submission but our client’s site has not been listed. (Both categories are smaller than they were in 2006 [18:17 & 29:28])

Now that leaves several possibilities

1) DMOZ is inundated with submissions and or spam and doesn’t have time to add valuable sites in some areas.
2) The site is not good enough to be added to DMOZ
3) There are not enough editors
4) The Editors may have a personal interest in ensuring some sites can not be listed
5) The Editors have a personal interest in ensuring some categories remain small.

3 is unlikely as both categories have been edited on several occasions and was refuted is several threads including the recent one on DMOZ getting smaller [webmasterworld.com...]

4 or 5 wouldn’t matter for private directories but for DMOZ they are very important because they are at odds with the social contract and the principles of open source.

We will make every effort to build a high quality and comprehensive directory. We will make every effort to evaluate all sites submitted to the directory. However, we do not guarantee all submitted sites will get listed. We will be highly selective and judicious about sites we add, and how we organize them

If 4 & 5 are occurring it is not acceptable to pretend that they are not occurring and use 1 as an excuse to cover this up as this would be extremely misleading to companies who rely on DMOZ to provide data to base their algorithms on.

I therefore assumed 1 to be the case and I find it puzzling when you write

gpmgroup, I've spent quite a bit of time (over the past few years) thinking about something like what you suggest. But ... we have to face the facts: it's a solution looking for a problem.