hutcheson

The editor side works fine, which is critical to the Project. The public side is apparently under attack by what is in effect a simulated-DDOS attack (or cooperative DOS attacks.) Staff knows about the problem, and says there are hardware and software enhancements coming.

>Froogle is also unfair competition for independent sites who just want to make commissions to stay alive. So is Microsoft, but we're not the Fates, or even the FTC. We just list web sites. >Have you considered a section called "Crummy Affiliate Shopping Guides" or something similar. Yes. We did that with MLM sites. The experiment was very successful: it showed us a good approach to avoid with vigor. We shall not repeat the experiment with ANYTHING anytime soon.

Yes.

There's another dimension to "fairness," that is embedded in most national legal systems as well as implicitly included in the ODP guidelines. And that's the temporal aspect. The first guy to publish a new idea has special ("patent") rights. That may not be fair to the second guy to publish, who really had the idea first but was in the hospital at the time: but it was considered a good deal for society -- it encouraged people to publish good ideas, and after 14 years or so, anybody could be using them. The first website to post e-texts of the complete works of Sir Walter Scott has certainly created unique content. The second website....probably hasn't. And the ODP lists "unique content." Now, there are ways in which the second edition may be better than the first, and in fact the ODP often lists several versions of classic works: some in ASCII form, some in HTML, some in annotated hypertext, some on standard archive servers, some at authoritative but shortlived academic sites, some integrated into personal fan pages, etc. (And I've published some XML versions of texts previously available only in ASCII or primitive HTML.) But after we've a half-dozen copies of a text, then we really have to ask: is this ADDITIONAL copy really worth it? The sites you mention have been around longer than yours -- so to be "fair," in the socially accepted theory of creativity, they SHOULD be treated BETTER. (How much better? editor discretion.) And, to the extent that those sites have content similar to yours, they reduce any conceivable value that yours might add to the directory. And to be fair to the USER, the presence of similar sites raises the bar for your site's judgment. Life is like that. You can't open a new gas station across the road from an established station, and expect to get business charging the same price. You've got to add value somewhere. So when you say, "my site is exactly like 20 sites that are already listed, so you must list it," You're not even barking up the wrong tree, you're digging a hole for yourself on the wrong side of the forest. What you _must_ be able to say is, "my site is totally DIFFERENT from all 20 related sites that are already listed" -- and yes, we know that that is a harder thing to say than "my site is different from all 3 sites already listed."

All public access is being throttled back right now, as a result of persistant malicious accesses from the public side. And surely staff is exploring a variety of techniques to identify and block the perps. What you are seeing may be coincidental, since public accesses often time out as a result of the load limits. Or you may have run afoul of some real block. In either case, editors won't be able to help, as they don't have access, control, or even information relating to the technical details of dmoz.org 's server-level spam defenses. You'd have to contact staff@dmoz.org .

_Think_, mon! Do you really believe Google to assign a highly paid technician to go inspect the RDF dump manually, mentally parsing it according to his expert knowledge of XML, to make sure it's the right one? Or, just possibly, might they have a script that automatically runs each week, and automatically checks the official place to see if they can find a good one? The people who want to pore over a broken or crippled RDF file by hand can find it in an odd place -- it's hardly been kept secret. The scripts that expect a fully functional one will keep not fining it in the expected place, until there is one to find in the expected place. That's not even elementary, that's downright particular.

Sorry, the answer is "yes". The good news, however, is that the Google directory can't be updated right now because of various problems (search for "RDF dump" in the forums) so the listing will stay there until they get that straightened out.

Re: www.vitalcomms.com any info on submissi It hasn't been looked at yet. You did submit it under Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom , didn't you, because it looks pretty specific to that region? If not, you can now.

Waiting for review in Science/Social_Sciences/Language_and_Linguistics/Translation

>I just feel that the site deserves to have more than one link since it has covered several topics and the focus is not only in one area. Your feelings are understandable under the circumstances, but very misleading. Basically you have a link collection. Compare the ODP, which already has over 10,000 links (including @subcats). Are you REALLY adding anything of value to that--or would we be better off just adding any links from that page that we hadn't already listed? [i don't believe editors without a personal attachment to the site would hesitate even one instant before just mining the links.] Or compare Yahoo Middle East: 1240 links, categorized into dozens of categories, with descriptions: and ... not deeplinked at all. You have a LOT of work to do on your Middle East page (!) before it DESERVES to be even as deeplinked as Yahoo! The Open Directory leans over backwards in an attempt to be "comprehensive" and include itty-bitty sites. But one page of links doesn't come within two orders of magnitude of the "EXCEPTIONAL" content required to warrant deeplinking a directory in that large and high-level a category. Just because we list one tiny site in a category doesn't mean we have obligated ourselves to deeplink every page of every slightly larger site that contains that much content.

Lots of possibilities: 1) Editor made a mistake in the first place, and it was corrected later. 2) ODP guidelines changed, and listing removed to comply with the new guidelines. 3) Site changed [OK, you've eliminated this one] 4) ODP reorganization In this case, all three reasons seem to be involved: the site was considered borderline content, and apparently added to that category by accident..."unreviewed" later but moved to lies inappropriate categories (where there are therefore more lenient content criteria) for review. To the question "what is the current status?" the answer is "waiting review in Arts/Visual_Arts/Multiple_Media_Artists/W".

FTR, you're right, I mark them [requires Flash] and leave them languishing. Almost every editor has a class of sites they won't touch for one reason or another. No problem, we can all leave them for someone who can review it sympathetically.

>>then surely it should cross that editors mind that a courtesy notice is appropriate. No, it surely should not. If you want search engine monitoring services, there are many people you can hire for that. Our editors are building and maintaining a directory. We strongly recommend that they avoid contacting outside parties, and simply concentrate on reviewing websites.

>The problem is that some of the advice you read on the internet about submissions to search engines suggest that you should submit once a month. Yes, that advice that was given out to people to teach them how to spam Altavista and Excite. The result was that Altavista and Excite ceased to be usable, and disappeared as search engines. Another result was that the new search engines (Google and Inktomi) either charged for submittals, or basically ignored duplicates. The ODP is getting better at ignoring duplicates, and I think it will have to get still better, to avoid being buried by the legacy spammers and their spawn. You might consider that the ODP submittal guidelines (which do NOT suggest repeating every month) created by the people who want to list websites, are more likely to be in your best interest than the obsolete advice of malicious spammers.

Re: Submission Status-www.venturecapitalguru.com Apparently at the time it was reviewed, important links were disfunctional. If I saw the same thing (and I'm not sure that what I saw was the same thing) the impression was that the site was not at all about "[online] resources" but about "offering services." I saw nothing at all on the site of which I could say, "if I were an entrepreneur looking for a website with such and such particular information, this would be the site I would come to." -- and THAT'S my definition of a "resource," [discursus: this kind of terminology frequently causes confusion. "Christianity" has categories for public speakers, artists and performers, personal pages, organizations, etc;, etc., etc. But do people submit sites to those pages? NO! They hunt through till they find a category with the word "Ministry" in it -- and submit everything there. I'm not a hand-puppet performer, I'm a children's ministry! I'm not a musical illiterate with a big amplifier, I'm a worship ministry! I'm not a self-promotional speaker, I'm a motivation ministry! We're not a college Bible club, we're a campus ministry! I'm not a bookstore, candle-store, t-shirt shop, craft shop, klitch-store....you're right, all "ministries." Well, that's the religious jargon. In Brazil, somebody thought that all websites of any kind whatsoever should be listed in a category called "Web Applications." And the same thing happens to categories called "Resources."] This doesn't mean the site can't be listed--the services in question are offered by a unique person, and therefore it unquestionably SHOULD be listed somewhere. And perhaps you may find some competitors listed in that category -- even PROPERLY listed there (if they include information that would be truly valuable even to visitors who do not wish to hire them. But it seems to me that there needs to be a "Consultants" or some such category, into which your site would naturally fit. Part of the problem may be (if I may indulge in a bit of prejudicial speculation) that that whole area has a taxonomy infected by marketroidish-encephalopathy. It is defined by its target audience rather than its content, and therefore is simply not going to be useful to _any_ target audience possessed of enough intelligence to find it. This is, of course, our fault and not yours. I'd suggest resubmitting, to a higher level category, and hoping that we can work out a better taxonomy. I'd also recommend getting a second opinion before acting.

Re: Submission Status-www.venturecapitalguru.com Rejected, site apparently not functional at the time. I cannot help thinking that is a very wrong category choice, although I confess I don't see anything that jumps out as a "very good" choice.

Lemme put it this way. So long as _I'm_ around, when they say "Flash Bigot" they won't be talking about _you_. No bones about it. I do _not_ review Flash sites. (or any other site that requires ActiveX.) That means I don't list them, either. And I don't care who knows it. But that's all just a matter of security principles. In reality, I just hate, hate, hate having to wait long minutes for something to download just so the page won't sit still while I'm trying to review it. I hate not having the hyperlinks marked in the customary way, I hate playing "find the hot spot" with some genetically challenged graphics designer, and I'm not ever going to like anything that comes between me and my information. And when you come around taking up contributions for the "fund to finance surgery to reverse the lobotomies for Flash developers, I'm not going to contribute. I strongly favor euthanasia, and I don't mind much if it's not altogether painless.

It's strictly an editor choice. I've heard of editors who always religiously reviewed in submittal date order. I never use it. The other options are better for detecting spam and performing triage (quick-reject, quick-move, full-review) on large heaps of unreviewed. And I do _lots_ of triage.

Looks like you peeked in the middle of a small-scale reorg. It happens. (There's a reason it's not called the Completed Ultimate Open Directory Product.)

Waiting review there, in what probably will be the right category, in a very short queue.

>Other sites that are my main competition are still in the other category This is not at all a concern to us. It is not how much they compete in the same category, it's how much they offer in other categories, that warrants the more general listing. >more than a few still in the main location are the same as me, security blankets. This may be a concern. Could you list the sites that you think belong in the same category (again, not because they compete with you, but because they don't compete other than with you.)

>e-commerce is more than having some text nice pictures and videos like adult sites In the case of e-commerce, we distinguish between sites of businesses that offer their unique services (e-commerce) and sites that advertise services offered by someone else (e-marketing, A.K.A. spam.) If a business would be a business without the website, then a website describing that business's products is "unique content". If the website is the business, and there is no other website in the world that offers the same content, then it's "unique content." If there is no business without the website, and other websites offer the same product, then it's not unique.

Wishful thinking?

Waiting review in the latter category.

Listed there and also in http://dmoz.org/Business/Arts_and_Entertainment/Amusement/