security at dmoz

[scorpion]

What is to prevent someone from say submitting a change request for a domain name, they might guess the right email address. Is this a good system?

[Laisha]

I'm not clear about what you're asking. Can you rephrase that, please?

[bird]

Nothing prevents you from submitting a change request, eg. trying to have your competitors listing "moved" to your own site. But since it will processed be a human editor, the chances of such a fraudulent request being successful are virtually nonexistent.

In general, if the existing listing points to a site that is in working order and doesn't display a "moved" notice, then the listing will neither be removed nor the URL changed to something else, without checking back with a contact listed on that site. In other words, the editor will e-mail the webmaster, asking them if the request is genuine. So it wouldn't be enough to guess that e-mail address, you'd also have to be able to answer it.

You're not the first one with that idea, but it doesn't work quite as easily.

[europeforvisitors]

There's one weakness with that system:

If a site is relaunched at a new URL and the old URL still exists (even as a redirect to a different site), there's no way to prove to DMOZ that the new URL is legitimate.

Need a real-life example? Go to the site in my profile and click on the "V----- for Visitors" link. This site is listed in DMOZ at an outdated URL. The page to which that URL points no longer exists, but the site's old network (a dot.com that rhymes with "snout") redirects the non-existent URL to an unrelated home page and continues to receive the traffic and the Google PageRank from the DMOZ listing. I've been trying to get this problem fixed for nearly a year via the update form, without luck. (Just the other day I wrote an editor several categories up the hierarchy since the category in which the site is listed doesn't have an editor, so we'll see what happens.)

[hutcheson]

The advantage of human editors is that they can handle exceptions such as the one you describe.

The disadvantage is that they don't always.

In the case you describe, if we can tell from the ODP description that the site's proprietor has changed, we can treat it like a domain hijacking, and go ahead and change/delete the URL.

[hstyri]

If a site is relaunched at a new URL and the old URL still exists (even as a redirect to a different site), there's no way to prove to DMOZ that the new URL is legitimate.

There are many ways to investigate the history of a web site and domain name. Experienced ODP editors are quite good at this. ;)