Zeal's modus operandi

How does it work?

[fischermx]

Hi,

I visited Zeal trying to do a submission for a site of mine. I signed up and now it ask me to have a quiz.
I don't find a quick route for a paid submission, does that exist in Zeal?
Could anybody explain how does Zeal work in a nutshell? :)

[GameMasterM]

Isn't it explained in the FAQs? Do they have a forum on the site? I believe they review only non-commercial sites but I'm not sure.

[The Contractor]

Could anybody explain how does Zeal work in a nutshell?

Last I remember you had to be an editor to add a site. Of course to be an editor you have to take the test and pass (which is very easy). You can add non-commercial sites only (which are reviewed by someone else - not sure the process to be able to add without being reviewed first). Paid/Commercial listings are through LookSmart. Of course the higher up editors can do things that other editors can't....

(if I'm wrong on the above or things have changed, feel free to correct me)

[LizardGroupie]

It's a very pale reflection of DMOZ.

[hutcheson]

I wouldn't call it a shadow of the ODP. It is another one of several experimental models of directory building, and if it isn't quite as old as the ODP, it's certainly back from the days when "general website directory" meant "Yahoo or pale shadow thereof." It is perhaps fair to say it's the "second most successful volunteer-human-edited directory" and "one of the few post-ODP-era surviving active general website directories."

Their governance is more like, say, slashdot than like wikipedia or Project Gutenberg: that is, driven more by editing statistics and "modding points" than by "oversight by formal quality control". And they are the only large web directory using that model.

(Opinions as to which model works better, the "democracy of two wolves and a lamb voting on dinner" or the "allegedly beneficient totalitarian" are best left to somewhere else.)

[harleyx]

I ended up PM'ing a high-up editor to deal with my submissions because the catagories under which I submitted sites apparently had editors that were on vacation - for 4 months.

For a website with such a time consuming registration process, I would have at least expected they would have had a system to deal with the submissions to catagories where editors had not logged in for X weeks/months.

I was not impressed. Not to mention since I've gotten 2 content rich sites listed, Zeal/Looksmart has contributed 29 visitors in the past 6 months. The Zeal links don't even show up in my linkpop.

Complete waste of time IMHO.