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I have submitted our site a couple of times in the last 3 months to one of these cats but have received no reply and have not been listed. I realize it is wrong to demand placement in dmoz, but I can't help feeling unfairly treated.
Our company produces a very cheap version of the competitor's product (about 5% of the price!) and is a very small organization in comparison.
Is there anyone I can e-mail about this or am I wasting my time worrying about it? We employ no spam tactics and have a clean site with reasonable content.
a friendly community of Dmoz editors, who should be able to explain things.
Shak
[edited by: Laisha at 1:53 pm (utc) on April 19, 2003]
[edit reason] Please see charter [/edit]
The time for inclusion does tend to be somewhat extended. Have a look at the bottom of the category that you submitted to in order to see when it was last edited. If it was recently and your (clean) site is not included then start asking questions.
It is also probably worth your while checking your competitor against editors in that area of DMOZ to ensure that the competitor is not an editor as well, and has added their own site twice (unfairly) - note that sites can be added two or more times quite legitimately under DMOZ rules, have a look at them too). Email a meta if it looks suspect, but you need to give a full expose, not heresay, if you follow that route!
Yes, I accept that it may have nothing to do with the adding of new sites... on the other hand it might...
For the "irate webmaster" who is not a DMOZ editor, it is one of the few clues that they can garner as to what is (or indeed is not) happening in that category.
If the last edit was done months ago (or even years ago!) then that is a true indicator that an editor rarely passes.
If the last edit was since the webmaster subitted their site, then whilst the category edit may have had nothing to do with adding sites, there is a sporting chance that it did.
On balance, I agree, that it should not be seen as a "red flag" in that instance, more a warning - "yellow flag" in motor racing terms!
This could mean nothing more than an editall, or an editor higher up the tree, spotted obvious spam and blew it away, or spotted a site obviously submitted to the wrong category and sent it over to the proper category. Thus, as a category being recently edited yet submitted sites not being added is correlated both with proper editing and improper editing, this is no indication as to which.
>If the last edit was done months ago (or even years ago!) then that is a true indicator that an editor rarely passes.
It could also mean that a dishonest editor is intentionally not editing their so as not to have to add a competitor's site. When the category was last edited, in and of itself, indicates *nothing*.
>If the last edit was since the webmaster subitted their site, then whilst the category edit may have had nothing to do with adding sites, there is a sporting chance that it did.
Not particularly. I commonly look in unreviewed of child cats where I can edit looking for spam and misplaced submissions, and if I find those I deal with them immediately. However, if the child cat has an active editor, I'll usually ignore the sites that I suspect qualify for listing hoping the other editor will deal with them. The last edit date is poor indicator of editing. If you are looking for something fishy, checking out what sites are listed make a lot more sense.
If sites have been added but not yours then that doesn't necessarily mean it has been rejected. There can be several other reasons for this.
As shak already wrote, you can try to get feedback in resource zone.
Not really. A lot of the editing that happens in categories, especially in spam-laden ones, is behind the scenes (i.e. in the unreviewed queue). So, while the last edit date might be an indication of when the last change to the public page was made, an old date isn't necessarily a sign that there's been no activity in the category at all since that date.
