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Have you tried to contact this editor? If after a week there's no response, then go up the category to an editor of the broader category your site should reside in.
Also, be sure that your site is appropriate for that site.
Some of these editors just love to kick a url around from one cat to another, and are totally afraid of taking the initiative in finding it a home.
Good luck!
having recently submitted and been listed this was the first reference to the submitted page.
Not to hide that I'm an editor, but because my system never used to open a 2nd window, and now I'm used to cutting and pasting.
So we're out there somewhere, but you won't always be able to tell where.
Just for the record i respect ODP editors alot there doing a great service, but i keep hearing more and more complaints about people having problems getting in and if an editor simply stops looking at pages with out resiging so another person can take over then they are a "Dead beat editor" If your an ODP editor that does there job then all the more to you and i respect what your doing.
-Donny
3 approvals and 1 rejected (the rejection informed me that the page was not suited for that category).
It was a nice surprise. Although, I have not great success with OPD this service response would greatly improve the quality of submissions and also reduce the workload in the long term.
(not knowing leads to many more submissions with the exact same listing, same page and same result.)
Rod
Can I put in a word for deadbeat website owners?
Once every couple of months or so ODP's spider checks links and highlights in red those that are 404ing or worse.
My editor's dashboard appears to light up in red -- in some cases, up to 10% of websites in a cat have changed their URL, and not told ODP about it.
Some of them I can't find their new address (maybe they didn't get googled at the new URL this month either). I have not many choices in that case, so the site gets deleted from the ODP directory.
Then people start moaning that they've been dropped.
D'OH!
Fathom: yes a weekly email saying something like "there are n unreviewed submissions in cat x which is managed by editor z" would help everyone a lot. You'd also be able to tell if you are being bounced around cats.
It was a nice surprise. Although, I have not great success with OPD this service response would greatly improve the quality of submissions and also reduce the workload in the long term.
But it takes longer to write the submitter an email, even a form email, than to review the submission. Call this factor 'n'. (Assume one site submission costs one of whatever unit you like.) Now suppose that this email means that 'x' submitters will submit fewer times. Call this factor 'm'. Now it's only worth it, from the editor's perspective, if the time that would be spent processing the extra submissions (m) is greater than the time needed email the original submitter (n):
(1) m > n
But, email often bounces, meaning that you waste some percentage of these emails because the submitter doesn't get them and *still* resubmits. Call this percentage 'b'. Now the equation is tipped a little more, because the benefits of the email are spread more thinly:
(2) m - (b * x) > n ( 0 < b < 1 )
So, if we consider ten submitters (x=10) who each initially submitted once, and only one of them gave a bogus email address (b=.1), and each submitter would have submitted an additional two times without the email (m=2), then in order for it to be worth the editor's time to write the email, 'n' must be one. That is, it must take no longer to write the email than it would to process the original submission.
Finally, there will be some submitters who will receive this email and write back hate mail to the original editor, causing him/her to resign out of disgust and not process any more submissions at all. This tips the scales even more - even though it wouldn't happen often, it will be responsible for weeks worth of backlog when it does, because nobody will notice that the affected editor resigned until someone applies for the category again - so it will likely remain untended, while submissions pile up.
The final factor that suggests this email is not a good use of time is that resubmissions can occur before the email would be sent. Suppose the submitter gets impatient and submits once a week, but the editor goes through the queue once every two weeks. The editor would see two submissions because the submitter is impatient - an email won't make the existing resubmissions go away.
In an organization where all the editors are paid, you can ask them to send email to the submitters if that's an organizational priority - it's not their time you're wasting, it's your money. But in a volunteer organization, people pick how to spend their time - and it is difficult to justify spending their time this way.
The obvious solution is for the submitters to have patience. It's not like a one-week delay is different than a one-month delay in terms of getting your site into the the downstream partners - just wait out the whole month before resubmitting if you have to, or contact the editor sooner. You don't have to employ a submission strategy whose guaranteed result is to slow down the editors - that doesn't help anybody.
The voluntary service that you as an OPD editors provide is not being questioned?
Personally I don't have time to do what you do (not to mention my grammar suck!)
With that in mind, your editors have assisted me more than you could possibility FATHOM. LOL!
As long as it takes, as many times it takes, I'll watch and wait, simply because without your referrals much of my work would be in vain.
On the email issue ... I sincerely understand the frsutration there.
I do believe that a person who forwards an address is "opting in" and deserves a reponse and they too are at as much risk of receiving unwanted "unprofessional" mail in return. If an email bounces backs (a bogus email) they really didn't want a legitimate listing anyway.
Please continue being an editor at OPD,there are alot more nice people out there than there are bad, and they need more people like you to help them online.
Rod
