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How long should I wait from the time of first submitting a site until contacting a more senior editor to ask for help in getting the site reviewed.
What is a reasonable balance between the demands on the editors and the expectations of the submitting webmaster?
Craig
You don't think the contact is guaranteed to get a listing, do you? It might get rejected. If it does, will you accept that or will you keep contacting this same editor again and again until you get your site included in ODP?
Take the question at face value.
A new site is submitted to a cat without an editor. How long is it reasonable to wait for a review before stepping up the editor tree to find one that may be able to help by doing the review?
And your answer is...?
The remainder of the questions your raise relate to quality of site which is a different issue altogether, covered more than adequately in the ODP guidelines and other supporting documentation. If I choose to ignore those then of course the site will get rejected. That's a statement of the obvious.
A good way of finding out where your submission stands is to post a question in the appropriate part of resource-zone.com
I am not sure that you will be any wiser from posting there
You will get a fast answer as to whether it is in the queue, and indeed they will tell you how many are in the queue, but you will be no wiser about how long it will take to be reviewed.
The "provisional wing" of editors will tell you forcefully that they are all volunteeers and nobody knows when editors will edit, so they cannot tell you how long before a site in the queue will get reviewed ;)
Nor can we tell you on here, either; simply because we do not know. We do not treat enquiries on fora as an opportunity to jump the queue. On the other forum, you are given confirmation that the site _is in the queue or that it has been deleted because the site didn't meet the guidelines. If asking on that forum meant that you were automatically reviewed and listed immediately there would be thousands of posts per day and no-one would be able to keep up with it.
Sometimes, an editor may check a submission and find a category long-neglected but with a small number of sites awaiting review. In that case, an editor _may decide to review all the entries. This is then fair, as the queue hasn't been jumped within the category. This is a rarity, as many enquiries seem to concern categories that are overflowing with inappropriate submissions, and large queues.
You will get a fast answer as to whether it is in the queue, and indeed they will tell you how many are in the queue, but you will be no wiser about how long it will take to be reviewed.
While this is definitely true, sometimes just knowing you are still in the queue and how long it is gives you an idea of if you should sit tight or go higher.
For example, the category I was interested in didn't have an editor but resource-zone was able to tell me the queue for that cat was slowly being looked at but it was very long. My site still hasn't actually been reviewed but at least I know it's not sitting in no-mans land and I also know that there's no point resubmitting or emailing higher. I'm happy to be patient as long as I know there's nothing I can do in the meantime.
The way I see it, the more information you have about the state of your submission, the easier it is to decide what to do about it :)
