Forum Moderators: open
Well, I can't disagree with your wish. The fact is that 3-6 months is the AVERAGE wait for review for SUBMITTED sites. (We have no idea how long unsubmitted sites wait for review, but we are just as concerned about improving that also! Of course, the way YOU can help speed us there is by submitting the sites, thus reducing that problem to the other, also unsolved, problem.)
Logically speaking, the approach has to be something like:
1) Get more help
1a) Attract more good volunteers
1b) Make editing a more attractive activity for editors
1c) Build better automatic spam-filter tools
1d) Get more help from non-editors
2) Make better use of the help we have
2a) Better trained editors
2b) Better user interface and tools
2c) Block distractions
It is easy to see that some suggestions are massively counter-productive. Placing new obligations on editors, for instance, significantly impacts or blocks avenues 1a, 1b, 2a, and 2c. Others are ambiguous: building better tools meets 1c while imposing more effort on 2a -- and the effect on 1b is different for each editor.
Also, some suggestions can be implemented by anyone (certain classes of tools) while others must be done by paid staff. It's not particularly productive to make dmoz.org user interface suggestions here. Most of them, both good and bad, have already been made in the internal forums, and either been rejected or been prioritized for possible future implementation by Netscape's corporate offices. Editors can agree or disagree about their importance, but all the discussion is futile, since nobody who has any power to make decisions is listening.
For taxonomic comprehensiveness, we must mention the "why can't you stop beating your wife?" type "suggestions:" like "Why can't ODP be more open and honest?" That's not a suggestion, that's simply an opinion without enough content to even have a truth value, let alone to determine what it might be.
A constructive suggestion must be based on consideration of these issues:
-- Who would have to implement it?
-- Which avenues of improvement would it address, and how?
-- What would the expense be (impact on other potential areas needing improvement)?
For instance, let me mention a proposal, often made, to allow the status of a site to be determined.
1) Staff would have to implement that: the information is not directly available even to meta-editors now. It would be a significant effort (man-months, probably). That time would not be available for building other tools that would improve editing efficiency, and so that proposal must be compared with every other proposed enhancement (obviously, this last bit of analysis simply can't be fully done by editors, let alone visitors.)
2) Assuming (probably safely) that the information would be available to editors, this would indeed help editors track down both malicious spam and careless repeat submittals -- both of which are perpetual and painful tasks. This would be a very good thing.
3) Its effect on outside submitters is harder to calculate. Would it give away too much information to the megalithic-spammer class of submitters? (although less than 1 in 10,000 submitters, they generate 10-20% of the spam.) Any tool that would allow them to better probe our automated spam-prevention tools is probably dead on arrival, and for reasons which I am not about to go into here, I am afraid that this proposal may do that.
4) On the other hand, this would certainly provide an automated answer to a very common, legitimate question from many helpful submitters: and thus free editors up to do other things in the forum. This would altogether be a good thing.
Will this ever be done? I can't say. Could issues #1 and 3 be resolved in some way? Probably.... But clearly, neither of them can be addressed profitably IN THIS FORUM ... and so proposing this feature simply can't be done constructively here. (It has, of course, already been made once or twice in the editors' forums; although not yet in any way that I could unreservedly support.)
In contrast, as an example of constructive suggestion, the infamous "Cannot determine IP address" message. Outside forums helped us track down the "please resubmit" text in those messages (which were misleading, we all agree), and staff believes that the "please resubmits" have all been removed. (If you see more of them, please mention it in your choice of forum!) The IP address detection process itself can't be discussed here -- it involves too many internal and technical issues, some of which editors aren't privy to. But we know about the problems, and I believe that process will be improved, just as soon as staff can figure out exactly what "improvement" entails in this context.
Actually, when I edited with DMOZ I found that I was constantly dealing with spam submissions. Some of these could easily be deal with if DMOZ had at its disposal some kind of web crawler that could do a similar thing as Google does which is to check for duplicate content or spam tactics. Therefore, these duplicate or spam submissions could be deleted even before they come to the editor.
I notice there are many caegories with spammy sites or sites with little value on Dmoz. Whether this is the editor's fault or not it is a real problem and a waste of editor's time and meta-editors who must also watch the editors. In my case I had added my own site to my category. Had I been told that I was abusing my authority, I would have removed the site myself. This leads me to the next big problem with DMOZ. Good editors make mistakes and sometimes don't realize it until it's too late and they are removed. These editors who spent hundreds of hours of their time working for free to help DMOZ are suddenly dropped, treated like trash (or worse as spammers), and are given no explanation as to why. Dmoz needs its editors and shouldn't treat them this way. If an employer did this, they would be sued. It just isn't in keeping with the philosophies of an open directory.
As result of these types of problems, Dmoz is in many times slow and ineffective.
p.s. I had submitted several quality sites over 6 months ago which are still not listed, while sites of very questionable quality are being added.
"Why can't ODP be more open and honest?"
This is the question. Anybody can pass a test and join zeal and see all the editor feedback and submossion notes they want to. This is called "open". Tracking the sites of ex-editors in non-public categories is called secretive.
Another nice feature of Zeal: The Intervention Request. That's impressive; that's democracy.
Just because you don't like the question doesn't mean it's not a valid question. If some editors stiopped playing politics for a minute and listened to the thousands of people asking, "Why can't ODP be more open and honest?" it would go a long ways toward progress.
You want the ODP to be more open. What exactly (except for this list that you keep on about), do you want to know, and why? What are your motives - the good of the Internet, a fascination with the ODP, or some personal agenda? There are many things about the workings that even the editors don't know about. We just list sites.
No, not fundamentally dishonest. Just closed. Secretive and not democratic. Why isn't the process open to public scrutiny? As I have mentioned several times, Zeal notes are visible to anybody. This is open. This is honest. When everything is visible to all, corruption is less likely.
