wladek

Przenios³em ten w±tek do nowego, polskojêzycznego forum. Teraz mo¿emy poszczególne tematy omawiaæ w osobnych w±tkach. W najbli¿szym czasie spróbujê rozdzieliæ wypowiedzi z tego w±tku na osobne tematy, a je¶li jest tka potrzeba, to postaram siê odpowiedzieæ ju¿ w odpowiednich w±tkach.

Indeed, you are right about those three sites. Thank you very much for valid abuse report. OTOH your suspitions about malicious intentions behind your removal are pure nonsense. The detailed history of the whole case is on the record and there is nothing to support your theory. IMHO it should be obvious to you what you did wrong. If you want to say something about it to us - please write directly to one of metas. We still have one unresolved problem and your suggestions could help.

MeggieKate, we do not list products, we list websites. Your site is listed and adequately described in .../Materials/Metals. How our user would benefit from inclusion of all pages from your catalogue separately? I am not a /Business editor but IMHO the only place outside .../Metals where I would consider additional listing is /Business/Industries/Manufacturing/Materials/Ceramics where one of your ceramics pages would probably fit. From ODP Guidelines: "Deeplinking an URL Deeplinking is the process of adding links to sub-pages within a site. In the vast majority of categories and branches, deeplinking is the exception rather than the rule. Deeplinks should offer content that is unique and extremely useful to a particular category. (...) Ultimately, all deeplinking decisions are subject to staff approval."

Re: A personal experience (former editor) For me your request posted above shows your will to come back - so I reinstated your account with slightly trimmed list of categories. Please take a while to read our current guidelines, check current category charters etc. and then ask for wider priviliges. Also I gave you a new type of priviliges to one category: 'greenbuster'. You are allowed to review and edit entries from unreviewed but not to publish them. For this acceptation from higher level editor is required. This new feature is tested now and in your case it is probably a temporary limitation.

I will not take your application (I am not familiar with /Computers tree) but it should be answered over the next few days. BTW from editors we expect proper spelling.

Re: The unspoken objection? If you're going to call yourself open, then be open, We call ourselves open</font color=green>, because (1) our product is open</font color=green> - everybody can use and modify our RDF dump in any way without limitations other than proper attribution. (2) our rules are open</font color=green> - all our guidelines are open to read and review (3) our process is open</font color=green> for thousands of qualified volunteers. Editing logs and notes are open to those who volunteer to edit, including over 150 editalls and metas who can view all logs. (4)we are open</font color=green> to submissions and we do not require submitters to pay for review or inclusion. You are free to start your own project, more open or open in other way. provide a link on every category page to a page listing the edit history of that category You can always browse/analyse our past RDF dumps and publish a detailed ODP history in your preferred format, including week when any entry was added/changed/deleted. The only hidden data is who</font color=blue> and why</font color=blue> did given editing action. We are not going to release this data. We believe our model works well and we are not eager to change its basic rules. Those rules include editor's privacy and 'no one owns category' collective editing style. ... including a list of sites pending approval--including date submitted. We are not a self-service directory. We do not publish sites just because somebody submitted them to us. Our directory is edited by editors and we publish only edited data. In fact substantial part of our entries were never submitted. Most our editors actively search for entries appropriate for their categories. OTOH quality of submissions vary. Today I was working on /Regional/Europe/Poland submissions. Over 50% of submissions were apparently misplaced: published in languages other than english (and some of them in language other than english and</font color=red> polish /images/icons/wink.gif ) with content not related to Poland. I do not see any reason to publish them in any relation to this category. Also we do not want to encourage anyone to flood us with misplaced submissions. Just providing a raw number would be helpful Sorry, it would be misleading. In 'unreviewed' we store more than just unreviewed submissions. You can find there sites sent from other categories and sites which we found unavailable and we do not know why. Do they disappeared just temporary or maybe they simply moved to other url? IMHO what could</font color=green> be published are the dates: (1) when last edit was made to given category (2) when last edit was made to related unreviewed submissions (and if there are any unreviewed submissions). Above options will be considered. Problem is we have a backlog of requested features and most of them have higher priority so do not expect any additional publicly available data about status of submissions soon. Provide limited (50 words or less) ability for civilians to make editorial remarks (on a page linked from the category page), regarding the performance of category editor. You can always send feedback to editors. We will consider placing a more prominent link to feedback form on every page. Fact is, many ODP editors are making no effort to maintain the categories No editors owns the category. When one editor retires or lowers level of activity others can step in. the category remains embarrassing evidence of ODP disfunction. Most entries in cited category were last edited in March 2002 immediately after problem was mentioned at XODP forum (and before</font color=green> this thread was started). All entries are relevant. No unreviewed submissions. If you know more relevant sites - please submit them. Your comments are at least misdirected.

Mel, Thank you for starting this thread and keeping it alive. IMHO this thread alone justifies all efforts to set up this forum. I do believe that if ODP believe they are something other than another information resource (and to the SEARCHERS they are just another search engine) they are going to have problems. Please remember that we have to deal with both volunteers and users. Most volunteers want to solve their own need and to do what they love: to list sites. Personally I had a long personal bookmarks list in my browser before I joined ODP and I still consider ODP a huge extention to it. Those like myself would be building and improving their common bookmarks list even without any external users, just for ourselves. Now let see at ODP from user's (searcher's in your language) point of view. Due to my personal curiosity and my job I do tens of searches a day using both automatic search engines and directories. I do know what I expect from both and I use them differently. On directories I use internal search engine only to find relevant categories. I do expect to find most relevant content listed in appropriate category and related ones. Yes, I actually browse directories. What I found interesting: during my searches sites are getting more hits through search engines (it equals google in my case) than through directories BUT from my point of view pages found through directories are much more relevant. Let me rephrase it: according to statistics search engine is a winner BUT my impression remains that the best content I was able to find through directories. Why I wrote it all? Because if the only important use of directory would be through search engine the whole idea of directory would be ridiculus! Why to bother about categories? Just build a huge flat list of sites with keyword lists reviewed by human editor! Once again: to feed a search engines with relevant data you need only a qualified human editor editing the descriptions and keyword lists and comparing them with actual content of site. We believe there is around a significant group of users who use directories as such. Are they a minority among general internet public? Personally, I don't care. Our goal is to built most comprehensive and relevant directory. If our data can be used in other ways it is OK but it does not change my goal.

ODP claims to have 45,000 human editors ODP has close to 10.000 active, listed editors. Others timed out after a period of inactivity (some od them never did a single edit after beeing approved /images/icons/frown.gif ). Some (less than 3% of those inactive) were removed. (description) changed at no cost to a satisfactory Satisfactory for site owner or to ODP user? We are always ready to improve our description of an actual content of site. OTOH we are not so willing to include keywords, promotional language and commercial offers. BTW: At ODP all our actions are performed at no cost to whoever. it may take up from three to six months before I see any results Sorry, it happens. To prevent such a long delays: 1. submit your sites to the most appropriate category. 2. be sure suggested descriptions follow the ODP Editing Guidelines If it does not help: Sometimes category gets lot of submissions and editors are unable to process them timely. In such a case you cannot do much to make it faster - usually we know the problem and periodically we organise a cleaning action by special group of volunteers. Rarely cleaning gets out of control and is singlehandly performed by abusive, clueless or simply lazy editor. A massive deletion of submissions is considered a serious abuse but not always gets noticed before substantial harm is done. All submitter can do in above cases is to resubmit after a two month and/or email a top-level editor. Sometimes your site is not listed because editor decided it does not offer any original, unique content. Editors are not obliged to notify submitter about their decision. You can always ask the editor or resubmit after a two months. The last possible case is an abandonned category. The best solution is to email editors of higher categories, including the top ones. I can imagine feasible software solutions to provide submitters a feedback about current status of their submissions but - sorry! - technically we are not able to introduce it in a foreseenable future. OTOH basic secrecy about editor's comments, debates, doubts and justifications of their actions it crucial to keep their communications open and honest and to make their work enviromment comfortable enough to keep them with us. Also we are not willing to promote (or dis-promote) sites we talk about by making our internal notes indexable for external search engines ... /images/icons/frown.gif .

Witam, gdyby kto¶ mia³ pytania, uwagi, komentarze na temat ODP i chcia³by porozmawiaæ po polsku albo na tematy zwi±zane z drzewem /World/Polska - zapraszam tu! W³adek, ODP meta-redaktor