jimnoble - 11:25 am on Sep 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

Confidentiality
I'm treading two fine lines here:
Leosghost has told me by PM the category that particularly concerns him and the URL of his website that he alleged had been removed abusively. He's not mentioned them in the open forum so I'll respect that and not mention them here either.

I'm also bound by our Editor Guidelines (Google them) both in word and in spirit

The content of the ODP Editor Forum, Editors' Notes, and Editor-to-Editor email or Feedback are private and intended only for internal use by ODP editors. Editors may not publish or disclose quotes from these sources to anyone other than other editors or the ODP staff

Alleged Abuse
The category in question lies within our Arts branch and it had a named editor until mid-2007. Since then, it's been edited by editors with global permissions or by editors with permissions in parent categories. The category logs survived the 'great crash' in 2007 and I can see every editing transaction back to 1999.

I can say that very little human editing editing has taken place since 2007 and none since 2010. On the other hand, our robots have carried on undertaking routine quality control and unreviewing (moving them back to the pool of websites awaiting human editor action) any that have been unavailable for a period of grace.

This what happened with Leosghost's website. It was unreviewed by a robot on 2009-05-29 with this note: "At present this URL redirects (code 302) to <URL of ISP's suspended page redacted> (suspended.page - it might be a good idea to wait a bit if it comes back or will be hijacked. )". It's still sitting there in the unreviewed pool awaiting the attentions of some volnteer editor.

As with any category, quite a few listings have become available (transiently or permanently) in the intervening years and they are similarly awaiting attention.

I can find no evidence of editorial abuse.

New editors
Of course we welcome new editors, but not to all categories. Those that have more than 100 listings, are at a high level or are spam magnets are unsuitable and their 'become an editor' links are often disabled. That's the case with the category that Leosghost is interested in.

Any application should be treated as seriously as a job application - because that's what it is. We're particularly looking for fluency in the category's language, an understanding of the category and integrity. There's plenty of more detailed advice on this over at RZ.

Contacting Editors
There's normally no need to contact a particular editor directly. Our 'update listing' and 'report abuse' links at the top of each category pass the message into our system where it can be handled by _any_ editor with appropriate permissions.

However, all editors have a 'contact <editorname> form on their profiles. If you really must contact one, use it.

Messages to individual editors asking about submission status or requesting expedited evaluations don't serve any useful purpose and we advise editors to ignore them. Any resulting conversation ends badly all too often. Abusive language, spam bombs, threats of violence and even physical stalking are not unknown. All of these tend to be somewhat demotivating :(.

Editors Contacting You
This is rare and discouraged - for the reason given in the previous paragraph. If editors feel they must communicate, they are strongly advised to use throwaway email addresses to protect their privacy.

Editor Websites
Editors with personal websites are able to link to them from their profiles. These websites are not obligatory, not part of DMOZ and editors can maintain them or not as they wish. I don't think their lack or functionality are grounds for complaint.

Summary
I've treated this thread both as an abuse report (unfounded) and as an opportunity for educating other members here. For the latter, none of what I've said is new or unavailable in other publicly available documentation. For more info, try DMOZ's help link on its home page or RZ.

Thanks for the opportunity :)