Forum Moderators: open
-Edited
I did go to the resource zone to inquire about the status of the site. It is not rejected. Last time I posted there, about 3 months ago, they said it is still waiting for approval along with like 20 million other sites.
I didn't mean to whine. It just surprises me how dmoz works. Sorry if I offended anyone.
[edited by: Raymond at 2:19 pm (utc) on Mar. 29, 2004]
Metas and other editors have no access to AOL's pocketbook.
Surely you knew that already.
You're still misunderstanding this.
We're not trying to promote fairness among webmasters. We're trying to find as many good sites as possible. One helpful submitter could submit a dozen useful sites to us (I did this before I became an editor myself) and we don't want some automated code blocking them from doing this! Some domains contain a wealth of completely unrelated information; what on earth would it gain us to allow only one Geocities submission per month? And are you really so naive as to think spammers only have one URL apiece anyway?
The fact of the matter is, the senior editors at the ODP have years of experience fighting spam in all its pernicious incarnations. We have automated tools to deal with some of it; other spam must be handled by hand, and we know how. For very obvious reasons, editors are not allowed to discuss specific spam-fighting techniques publicly (as this would give the spammers clues). For probably less obvious reasons, but simple really if you think about it, we want to limit the amount of immediate feedback submitters get on each site, to keep spammers from operating at maximum efficiency. Honest webmasters have a stake in this too. The more spam there is, the slower submission review gets, and the less interest editors have in checking the submission queue at all. To overextend Hutcheson's metaphor, are you really going to go checking in the catbox during the easter egg hunt, even if you're pretty sure your annoying sister has hidden one in there somewhere? Especially when you know there are plenty in the living room?
I'm still curious to know why you want to be alerted when a site of yours is declined for a listing. I don't see what good it could do you, and all you've mentioned thus far is "It seems polite to me." Weighing that against a slower rate of review and acceptance of websites, I'm not sure the majority of webmasters would agree with your priorities anyway. People get impatient enough having to wait for six months... what would their mood be like if that doubled for no other reason than your finding it polite?
It takes months of hard work to produce a site. I've had sites kept out of the ODP due to competitors editing the category
What was the response when you submitted an abuse report on this?
They have their priorities, which are not necessarily yours or mine. But feel free to lobby them. They already have our list of priorities, and some work in this area is on that list.
>> It would take a database redesign.
>I beg to differ. It would take a single new table and a cron job.
You're assuming a small relational database. The ODP databases are neither small nor relational. Processes that run over the whole database already take multiple CPU-days. Converting the system to relational databases would take TONS of new hardware and a complete system redesign ... and then a database redesign. This is not your typical shopping-cart application, nor even Quickbooks. This is more like an accounting system for a company with 10,000 employees and a half million inventory items.
> What was the response when you submitted an abuse report on this?
Well - I only spotted it because at the time I was also an editor, I was able to read the bogus reasons placed in the change reasons and raise it with a senior editor. Who to be fair did an excellent job of sorting this out. But I no longer edit - I don't have time - and it is impossible to find these things out from the outside.
>You're still misunderstanding this.
>We're not trying to promote fairness among webmasters. We're trying to find as many good sites as possible. One helpful submitter could submit a dozen useful sites to us
I think you are misunderstanding the suggestion - once in the queue having the SAME url/domain (depending on the domain used - free/vs hosted) submitted a dozen times is where it should be blocked. How would the same url being submitted 5 times in a week be helpful.
[added clarification]
[edited by: gethan at 7:09 am (utc) on April 19, 2004]
Not sure where this came from?
> Metas and other editors have no access to AOL's pocketbook.
Very aware of this one - if AOL actually spent a little money in the right place the world would be a better place.
Because otherwise I'm sitting on a forum in 6 months not knowing why a perfectly good site is not included in the category in DMOZ. Wondering if it is a) still in progress b) not listed due to a minor problem c) considered rubbish -- and then in the forums you get threads like these - not helpful to anyone.
>You're assuming a small relational database. The ODP databases are neither small nor relational. Processes that run over the whole database already take multiple CPU-days. Converting the system to relational databases would take TONS of new hardware and a complete system redesign ... and then a database redesign. This is not your typical shopping-cart application, nor even Quickbooks. This is more like an accounting system for a company with 10,000 employees and a half million inventory items.
Well before we get into a I've worked on a such and such a size project thread - these are not such huge numbers. A well thought out design would scale and ensure simple features like these could be added with the minimum of fuss.
So: this leads me to believe that the ODP is running on old badly designed software, on under invested upon hardware and that nobody is interested in updating it, if this is the case lets be honest about it. The ODP can't let webmasters know what the status of a submission is because the system is crap.
I don't understand; why is it so onerous for you to visit the help forum once every six months, if it's important for you to check up on it that often? That doesn't take up more than 10 minutes of your time and 10 minutes of ours. Whereas your instant-feedback request would cost us huge amounts of time and slow down review for everyone. If you're annoyed having to spend the 10 minutes every six months to find out your own site's status, how can you expect us to waste so much of our time and all the submitters' time delivering the news to your doorstep?
As for the spamming, as I've already said, any specific comments I made about spam here would only help spammers refine their techniques; so just let me say that idiots mechanically submitting the same site to us twice a week are the least of our worries, and that providing instant feedback on the status of every submitted site would most definitely allow spammers to waste more of our time more efficiently.
Even so simple a question as "exactly how long will a submittal wait for review?" is totally useless for real submitters, but is very valuable to spammers.
I know, a lot of real submitters ask anyway, so I'll explain why it wouldn't do any good to get the answer. Suppose you're depending on the ODP to get your site promoted. The answer to "how long must I wait?", whatever it is, is going to boil down to "too long." So you might as well skip the question, and go on to plan B -- other site promotion methods.
And why so valuable to spammers?
As soon as the time was up, they'd know we were on to them. Does the FBI publish its database of terror suspects? Do we want to tell spammers it's time to get a new fright mask, airport security was on to the first one.
No, we aren't ever going to help you with that.
Well, why do we answer questions about submittal status at all? It's not for the submitters who actually ask: they can think of themselves as survey samples in a quality control program. It provides a good measure of how we're doing at detecting spam without rejecting good sites. And that arguably helps us build a better directory, which is our purpose.
They figured out their way around the same-URL thing like five years ago. Luckily for us, we're still a few steps ahead of most of them (please bear in mind that this particular fellow's trick didn't *work*, so nobody go repeating it at home)... but you really, really DON'T want us to change anything that will make us have to spend more resources on them than we already do. If not for the spammers, most submitted sites would probably be reviewed within one month, at least from what I've seen. If we make life easier for the spammers, you could see your wait times could double or worse. :P
Well it's what everyone wants.
>> Say, Gethan, if you're still curious as to why simply blocking repeated submission of the same URL won't thwart spammers, go check out the "Site Banned" thread on this forum, if it hasn't yet been deleted. In that one a spammer complains that his competitors must have ratted him out for his duplicate submissions, since otherwise how could an editor have noticed the duplicate content since the domain names were different and the two sites were submitted to different categories.
Actually I remember reading that - good chance that a competitor spotted it, or equally a diligent editor - either way, the right outcome.
>> If not for the spammers, most submitted sites would probably be reviewed within one month, at least from what I've seen. If we make life easier for the spammers, you could see your wait times could double or worse. :P
OK thats the last thing I would want to see - if the original poster has a legite site then this thread would be entitled - "DMOZ submissions - over 2 years and counting"
I'll retire from the debate here - I see this from a webmasters point of view - and the editors from theirs, both of us have a common shared goal - a free and independent directory of all the quality sites on the internet - and a common enemy - spammers, whether email or site based should be torched.
Shame that we've moved so far from the days where an editor was able to quickly review a site, send a mail saying thanks for the submission and make the webmasters day. Blame the spammers.
I'm realisitc enough to admint that I (and probably 99% of web professionals) wouldn't give two shakes about our DMOZ submissions if they weren't given weight by the almighty google algo.
Having said that...it will be interesting to see the effect it has on DMOZ when/if Google finally drops them completely (at least as a part of the pagerank algo/process). I think then and only then the editors will finally be able to catch up on submissions...as very few people will probably even bother with it.
I don't understand. Why would they not consider ODP links in their page rank algorithm? What good is page rank if it only represents sites commercial webmasters like?
I'm not saying ODP links should count any different than links from anywhere else. In fact, Google Guy has stated they don't. At one time an ODP link probably did give a disproportionate boost to a site's PR. Now that the ODP is counted just like any other site, many webmasters don't seem to be able to adjust their perception to new realities.
-- Rich
If so, than 99% of web professionals don't have much of a clue. The vast majority of ODP commercial cats don't have a very high PR for the page, and because there are many sites listed in that cat, PR transferred to any listed site is negligable. And in the very rare cases where the above is not so, this usually means that whatever the site sells is in such a non-competitive area that doing well in Google would be trivial. (Think here something like a bricks and mortar shop in Podunk, Iowa listed in Regional that repairs old vacuum tube radios or such.) Really, for Google purposes getting links from teenager's home pages will help with Google SERPs more than an ODP listing on average.
I'd think the greater value of an ODP link would be the click through traffic from all the ODP clones out there. Unlike links from the sites of teenager's which are irrelevant to what the business is about, people using the ODP are already predisposed to buy. Given that an ODP links costs nothing, its worth it even if it results in only a handful of extra sales per month.
I couldn't agree with you more on that one. Please understand that I, too, am frustrated by my inability to quickly list every good site a webmaster submits to us. There's so much garbage and duplicitous stuff submitted that sifting through it all for the good suggestions is neither easy nor time-efficient. Perhaps as the poorly informed notice that that link from Google's home page has disappeared, the signal-noise ratio in some of those queues will improve somewhat. I can hope, anyway. (-:
