hutcheson

I was having some trouble with the public side late last night.

>>I quess that the editors who review the applications are rather bias. Can anyone share some tips on how to write a good application ? There is certainly a bias in favor of Standard English grammar, spelling, and syntax. (This snippet is 0 for 3.) I didn't see your application; so it may have been done more carefully. We review, classify, and describe websites. In my opinion, we do more, and do a better job of it, than any other general web directory. We're looking for more people who can do this honestly and well. Your self-description and your three website descriptions are all we have to judge you. 1) Demonstrate a facility in Standard English. This is a practical, not a moral, judgment. Nonstandard English (or other World language) makes the directory look unprofessional and seem unreliable. Some people aren't willing to take the trouble (or perhaps aren't able) to do this part of the editing task. We don't generally accept their work in the user-visible portion of the ODP. (But anyone at all can submit sites, and an editor will do the, um, editorial work on the description.) 2) Demonstrate a grasp of the ODP taxonomy. Find sites that match the category. 3) Demonstrate an understanding of the public benefit, and a willingness to do volunteer work for it. We know you have interests both personal and financial; so do we all. Be candid about them; show that you can temporarily set them aside for the common effort. (This isn't so strange -- you're already offering to give time, energy, and attention -- all of which you could have invested toward your own immediate benefit. And there are, in exchange, real benefits to having accomplished -- and being seen to have accomplished -- something this useful.) 4) A lot of people use the self-description to promise what they will do. A better recommendation is to describe what you have done. For instance, if you done 'pro bono' work building websites and and maintaining relevant link pages, cite the page! You're demonstrating a history of volunteer work including experience in reviewing and describing websites; you're also showing a knowledge of relevant websites that could benefit the directory. There's no set "perfect application," though: just remember that we're looking for people that have relevant skills and character, and give us evidence. 5) You may trust that personal information on your application will be kept confidential. The editing community does not see these applications; only ODP staff and meta-editors see these applications. You can, for instance, give a primary e-mail address, even though you plan to use a throwaway e-mail address for all communications related to editing. Nothing on your application (except your "editor ID") will automatically appear in your public profile, or even to other editors. Many editors, for various good reasons, prefer to work anonymously; we will respect that. But it is better to give accurate information in your application, and that will not prevent you from editing as anonymously as you wish.

Joseph, your concern is reasonable, and we know that you aren't the only webmaster who sets up a redirecting domain for that reason. But we still don't like to list them -- we have several concerns. One (alias URLs slipping in) has been mentioned. I'll mention another. Our current automatic broken-link sniffer can't probe through all kinds of redirection, so if links go dead, we don't find out on the next robozilla run. So lissa's approach is official. Yes, submit your permanent address. Yes, it will be listed as the "real" address....but if either the permanent or real address dies, we'll have both of them on record, and we'll use that information to correct your listing ... without requiring any action from you. All part of the ODP service /images/icons/smile.gif (not for you, of course--for the surfers who might want to find your site. But, all the same, don't reckon on any other major directory doing that, even after you paid them more money to list your site than you paid to have it hosted.)

"chainsaw" is merely the mode in which the unreviewed sites are shown: "chainsaw=1" is called "Power Edit" internally (and allows you to select several sites to handle all at once.), "chainsaw=2" is called "Super Edit" (and allows you to see unreviewed sites in subcategories all at once.) Some editors (like me) simply prefer the "Power Edit" screen, whether for listing, moving, or rejecting sites. It is certainly NOT exclusively for rejecting affiliate sites -- in fact, it is NOT even particularly useful for that. (You've got to look at each site individually to see whether it's affiliate spam anyway.) It IS particularly useful if you expect to see several duplicate submissions (you can whack them all at once) or if you expect to see several sites that were mis-submitted (as in an Arts category that gets lots of commercial submissions that should have gone to a related Shopping category.) "Power edit unreviewed" was generated for you all (you know who you are!) who submit your site every week to categories with large backlogs, until it shows up (at Hotbot.com!). We used to curse and curse and curse while we deleted all the duplicates one by one. Now we just click and sneer. By the way, if you were wondering what good it does to keep re-submitting a site like that, well, it helps motivate ODP staff to give editors more flexible tools.

>I didn’t submit the site to: http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Business/Investing/Financial_Calculators/ ...because there was no editor. That was a mistake. There's never "no" editor -- an editall (of which there are over 100) can edit any category, and an editor in any category can edit all the subcategories. And even if there were an editor listed, who is to know whether they had logged on within the last three months, let alone looked at that category? Always go to the "most suitable" category. That will nearly always result in faster listing for you AND more efficient editing (that is, faster listings for everyone.)

The ODP is profoundly disinterested in the way ANY site appears in ANY search engine. The ODP datadump is public information, we simply do not know how they use it today, and we expect them to use it differently tomorrow. We simply do not, and will not, change the DIRECTORY to affect SEARCH ENGINE results for any particular site. That would be considered editorial abuse, and anyone could lose editing privileges if they did that. By the way: "Update URL" requests to change the URL raise issues similar to the procedural problem mentioned above, and in this case we ARE interested in making valid changes. But -- the change must be verified at the OLD URL. If it can't be verified at the OLD URL, my practice is to contact the submitter explaining that they should post a "we've moved" notice at the OLD URL, and THEN submit the "Update URL" request.

This is a difficult thing to do. One reason is, the site wasn't listed for the webmaster, and it wouldn't necessarily be removed for the webmaster. ODP is for the surfers. Another reason is, it is hard to verify online that a "remove" request was really from the webmaster. We do periodically get "remove ME" requests from people that coincidentally are using an e-mail account at a competitor. Not all attempted saboteurs are quite so stupid, but nearly all "remove me" requests end up being sabotage attempts. [i do say "nearly all", because I do remember a MLM site that, after extensive internal and external discussion, we removed per the site owner's request. But that was a special case involving the special MLM category characteristics and guidelines.] If there is a reason -- at the SITE -- to move (or remove) a site (say, the site's focus has changed), then an "Update URL" request is the way to go. If you take the site down, it would eventually disappear from ODP (editors usually try to find a new copy of it first, though.)

>>They recently changed their site and product offerings so the first editor would not have known about expansion joints. I went over to do the "minimal" update, that is, to add "expansion joints" to the current description. But it already mentions them. I don't edit enough in Manufacturing to know whether those two categories are "too close together" for a site to be cross-listed in them, so I won't add a second listing, or move to the one to a higher level (my guess is that the former is more likely to be done in this case.) If you'd prefer one listing in a higher category, do a "change URL". If you'd prefer a second listing, then do an "Add URL" in the second category. (Of course, the final decision is still the editor's.) Another thing you might consider -- obviously this factory resides in some locality (in BC). The website mentions a couple of addresses, but I didn't see any other location-specific information. HOWEVER: If the website had a bit more about the local factory (say, a page about what kinds of employment opportunities are typically available, a blurb about what public service projects the company or employees sponsor locally, etc...) as an occasional Regional editor, I would be VERY comfortable adding the site to the appropriate Localities category in Regional/N.A./Canada/BC/Localities/whatever. Some more active Regional editors might consider that the site ALREADY has enough regional relevance to be listed -- after all, there is a local phone number and address.

I would so recommend. After looking at your site, I don't think you need to worry about losing the pipes&duct listing altogether; the worst (from a crude link-count SERP perspective) that could happen would be that it would be moved to a higher level category (and with the new product line added to the description.)

>>What would be the right procedure in asking for a second category without the risk of losing the first category listing? There is no such procedure. An editor may, upon re-review from the point of view of the new topic, reconsider the appropriateness of other listings. In a case like this (two sorta-related lines of business), there are several possibilities: 1) list the site in each subcat. 2) delete both subcats, but list the site in the parent cat (describing its two lines of business) 3) list the site in one subcat, but mention at the end of the description: "also offers ..." The editor should make that decision based on his impression of the focus, breadth, and depth of the site; and his best judgment of how to be fair to similar sites and best serve the user. There can't be a general hard-and-fast rule, although Shopping sites are (quite rightly) less-likely-than-any-other-kind-of-site to receive multiple listings.

Re: struggle - perseverance - success ? I haven't checked apeuro's analysis, but somehow I find it plausible, at least. This well illustrates the problems with affiliate sites. It is a major job to check for "unique content". Webmasters should understand that editors DON'T do this with every site. What would typically happen is that the content which is the "apparent primary focus" of the site is spot-checked. If that appears to be non-unique, the proper assumption will be that the whole site is, um, a work of compilation. And the whole site will get labelled "affiliate." Someone (editor or no) that doesn't know the typical sites in a category, or doesn't know how the affiliations and content-lifts are concealing themselves these days, or doesn't do the analysis, may be fooled into thinking the site has some merit. That is probably the intent in some cases. Sometimes we're fooled, just as sometimes Yahoo is fooled. (Looksmart, to their credit, can't be fooled--they list all the sites that are worth buying listings for.) But no site is guaranteed a permanent listing. And I think, now that this discussion has done such a thorough job of exposing some of the seamier aspects of affiliate sites, we may do a better job spotting and weeding out more sites that "don't contribute to the sum of human knowledge."

Re: How to change from a category which has no edi >>I hope your solution does not generate more work for editors ... No, no problem, just that it needs to be seen by someone who can edit in both categories. >>...and trust that there may not be too many situations like ours. Sigh. There are no unique problems here. I suspect there are several hundred such cases per month, some of which we don't notice...and the rate will grow as the ODP matures or as it grows -- both of which are happening simultaneously. Eventually we'll have to come up with a standard procedure for this. >>Since this is the first time we have submitted our site to search engines, we were quite surprised to find that it was already on several search engine lists. Hey, over at _ODP_ we don't just sit around waiting for sites to be submitted.;/images/dmoz/purplegrin.gif We hunt them out. And the rest sometimes, um, recycle our entries.;/images/dmoz/purplegrin.gif

Re: Correct categories and submission validation >>I am confused on becoming an editor for the category. If I can become an editor for a category and am allowed to include my own or affilated sites, wouldn't that open up a gaping hole for abuse? A hole, yes. "Gaping" hole? We hope not. The eyes of other editors, and the eyes of webmasters harmed by that abuse, are on the ODP. "Be sure your sins will find you out." >The other reason I cannot become an editor is because I would not be able to allocate time to the job to do it right. Sigh. Understood.

We don't have a good procedure for the request you've made. In principle you should do an "update URL" request (asking for change description and move to new category). But... The problem is not the lack of editor in the category you're moving from. It could be processed by an editor of any higher level category...by simply moving the site to Reference/Education/etc. The problem is lack of an editor in the Ref/Ed category. If the Folklore editor doesn't also edit in Ref/Ed, the site goes into "Unreviewed" (disappearing from the directory) until it is re-reviewed by a Ref/Ed editor (where, as has been mentioned, there is a huge backlog.) That, IMO, is a nasty thing to to do a webmaster who was trying to help us keep our directory entry relevant. And so a thoughtful Folklore editor wouldn't do it -- they would leave the "update URL" request for an editall to handle, so that the site would reappear immediately in Ref/Ed. Which, IMO, will greatly delay correcting a bad site listing -- which is a nasty thing to do to the directory itself: bad listings should be fixed as quickly as possible. By asking here, you probably did the best thing you could do. (But if 1000 people a month start doing that, I suspect it might break this forum down.) And since I can edit in both places (and even used to be listed on a supercategory of Mother Goose) I moved the site, with a quick review (and perhaps minimalistic description). It's now listed in Reference: Education: Products and Services: Early Childhood. This reflects the "commercial product" and "targeted to professional teachers of young children" aspects of the site.

Re: struggle - perseverance !! success ? >>I was implying that staff and other metas would be more lenient and trusting of the actions of other metas. I think the idea got garbled in translation the first time around. But what you say is true (well, sort of: I'd think of it the other way round.) Staff (generally after listening to recommendations of metas) chooses metas that they trust. So the ones they choose are the ones they already trusted. (no surprise there) With senior editors, a similar phenomenon occurs. They have done a lot of work....most of it obviously for the good of the directory (otherwise it would have been noticed long ago.) And so our presumption is in favor of trusting all of their work. Still, every editor is responsible to staff. We all know that with an "anyone can be an editor" approach, the most obvious disadvantage is that any crook can be an editor, and the reputation of the directory depends on weeding out the, um, abusively self-interested ones. So specific, documented claims of editor abuse, even against senior editors or metas, have to be taken seriously. Hence the current development work on an "abuse reporting procedure."

>>I only think our services are global ... and we are present in the US We don't care whether your services are global, or are only available in a single remote Kamchatkan bog. And we don't care whether you're present in the U.S., or only seasonally available on the planet. All that really matters is: >>we have an english version ... so an english listing is only logical. Now, if your product is only available in that R.K.B., the site would be listed somewhere in Regional/Asia/Russia/bla-bla-bla. But that's still an English-language category. Conversely, the same logic works for other languages. If a taxidermy site in Chicago had content in Irkutsk, and ODP had a World/Irkutsk category, it would be listed in World/Irkutsk/Regionalsk/Ameriska/Illinoitsk/blatsk-blatsk-blatsk (pardon my pidgin, I'm monolingual. Less linguistically challenged editors would be handling the site reviews.) This important distinction between REGIONAL and WORLD categories is not universally understood.;/images/dmoz/purplegrin.gif

In this case we actually ASK you to submit to categories in ALL appropriate languages. Although editors sometimes try to track down relevant categories in other languages, many editors simply don't have the language skills--so in general you can't expect them to. Usual caveat -- in each language, it would be the editor's judgment whether to list there, but a listing in, say, an English category would not prejudice the review for listing in World/Deutsch.

Ouch, ouch, ouch!!! Don't try typing, you'll regret it later, and not just for the incoherence of it... I didn't perceive anything you said as a personal attack. I tried to make the response useful for other webmasters' concerns, so I figured it wouldn't all apply to the particular site mentioned. (i.e. if I was attacking anything, it was meant to be impersonal.) But these commercial categories are hard to get volunteers to tend. (Unfortunately, with reason.) Last time I really took on a "please get my commercial site listed" request, I dealt with several hundred obviously inappropriate submissions in order to prune the unreviewed down to a couple dozen, which I passed off to an editor more experienced at detecting the subtlely inappropriate submissions. It took a couple of weeks. Maybe in a few months I'll try that again. Now multiply that by several thousand categories. Ouch.

>Since 0 listings have been added in the past week and you had stated there was approximately 50 to review, am I correct in thinking this may take many months to over a year to get my site listed? This is certainly possible. Or it is possible that we might accept a new volunteer editor in that category tomorrow. (It is really _almost_ impossible to predict. But see below.) >I did/do not expect to be listed in this short of a time,... Fair enough. Remember, there are volunteers doing this, and they do what they enjoy doing or enjoy having done. So, rather than thinking... >>... but I know my site is going “nowhere” without a listing in the ODP which isn't really true. If your site is really that valuable to YOU, then you have many ways to pay for exposure. ODP isn't one of them. In fact, any more, ODP is almost the ONLY place that isn't one of them. ;/images/dmoz/purplegrin.gif And on a serious commercial site, you will really need to seriously evaluate commercial site promotion venues. But an ODP listing is not about where the site is going, or where you're going, it's about where the user is going. The important question to ODP editors is, "Is this the kind of site where the SURFER is going nowhere WITHOUT it?" If the answer is yes, then chances are the site will get listed quickly (days or weeks.) If the answer is no, then months or years may be involved. But if the answer is that it is not worth money to you to promote it, and it's not of intrinsically great value to the surfer, then it would be unreasonable to expect an editor to place great value on listing it quickly. [side note: The converse isn't quite true. For instance, I (at least) used to consider a Yahoo listing a slight positive factor in deciding which sites to list quickly. Since Yahoo has gone so completely advertising-driven, this is less true. And we never guaranteed a listing to anything Yahoo lets in. And, of course, there are many "potentially profitable" affiliate or doorway sites that ODP prides itself in not listing.] So, what was all this more than saying "I don't know?" Not much, perhaps, except that I don't think anyone can know.

I'm not sure what you mean by "banned." If you were deliberately removed as editor, the article above lists the usual reasons. There would not have been any notice. It may have been that you didn't edit for several months, and your userid was inactivated. There would not have been any notice, which makes it hard for someone not knowing the circumstances to tell whether it was this or the first case. It may have been that you resigned from, or were dropped (by human error or software bug) from all your categories. In the nature of this case, you wouldn't get any notice, which makes it hard for ANYONE to distinguish it from the other cases. You can request reinstatement (in the latter two cases, unless your edits were very bad, metas generally comply): but if all your categories are gone, be prepared to also request a new category.

Re: trouble with submission A separate issue: >>i realize this is a competetive category I wouldn't put it that way. The CATEGORY is not at all competitive. If you actually have a debt consolidation business, it is easy to get a listing. (Some other, commercial directories may even be willing to take money to include multiple doorway pages for the same business, but their ideal is that they allow each business one-listing-in-category.) The KEYWORDS are very probably competitive at the SEARCH ENGINES. This is a VERY profitable business, like real estate or online porn, so businesses are willing to pay a lot of money to get marketing leads, so they have affiliate programs to increase their visibility in search results. These affiliate doorways are very valuable to the actual D.C. businesses, because they can potentially push their rivals out of site on the search engine results. But the ODP looks at sites from the viewpoint of the user. If our users can get to ABC Debt Consolidation via their home page, that's good enough. If they can get to DEF DebtCon Inc. via THEIR home page, again, that's good enough. We don't care which one, if either, the user clicks on. We don't care what the search engine does with our results. Another truth is that ODP gets a great number of site submissions for debt-consolidation affiliate doorways. And, unfortunately for your reputation, and unfortunately for the reputation of actual businesses in this industry, most of the submissions are very devious. Some of these people know that the sites wouldn't be listed if submitted honestly, so our experience is that these sites are generally characterized by great variety of deception. I'm reluctant to describe these techniques in detail (don't want to give you ideas, and especially don't want to tell you which techniques we're not catching yet) but there are indications that the affiliators are giving out advice as to the kind of deceptive information to put on a site to get it listed (that is, at least, if the editor is careless.) The result is that even legitimate businesses in these areas must be viewed with great suspicion and investigated with great care. And everybody's legitimate websites languish in unreviewed while we're trying to refine the dross out of the unreviewed queue. But perhaps this is what you meant by "competitive category."

Re: trouble with submission This is getting bogged down with details. You do not provide any debt consolidation services, and therefore you have NO unique content to place on the site. And therefore the site should NEVER be listed. windharp's suggestions are, I believe, irrelevant. There is no such company.

>>Can you or can you not change the hierarchy? Here's a pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. Can you or can you not dig the Nicaragua Canal? Of course you can. If, that is, you can convince the people who are using the land already, that they should give it to you. And if you are willing to invest the sweat. Go ahead. Hire a professional taxonomist -- Library Science major. Better yet, hire three. You'll need them for at least 2-3 years. Find a deficiency in the taxonomy that's recognized by dozens of editors already. Convince the editors in Religion that numbers suddenly matter, bearing in mind that we Christianity editors have been telling them all along that numbers don't matter (and making decisions as if numbers don't matter.) Revisit all those issues based on the assumption that numbers do matter, and show that many old problems won't be revived if we change this fundamental assumption. Learn that "it seems logical to ME" is no argument at all: because we've all known too many insane people. Since the ONLY argument that works is "it is generally recognized, and can be usefully extrapolated," recognize that the current structure was not only successfully defended, but successfully introduced with just this argument; discover the fallacy, and come up with a persuasive way of disabusing the editorial community. Gain several years' experience at dealing with practical and theoretical problems of taxonomy. Prepare a mockup of the new proposal, presenting it not only to ODP staff but also to the management and technical people at our major licensees (Netscape/ODP, Google, etc.) Remember that lobbying in an outside forum -- any outside forum -- is completely ineffective. It takes more than a human "X" chromosome to get a ballot, sweat equity is essential. If after doing all this, you are willing to spend the 2-3 years it will take, then yes, you can submit a proposal to dig your canal to the Republic of Nicaragua's Ministry of the Interior.

>>"your argument for exclusion of Christianity" I wouldn't know how to make any such argument. I'm with Jonathan Swift on that issue.

Sorry, I thought someone had already explained "@" links to you. You can easily see that Alternative Medicine is "apparently" but not "really" under Medicine by comparing the total number of links under Medicine with the total number of links under each of its subcategories. The discrepancy is due to the fact that the A.M. links are not "really" under Medicine. Or you could simply click on the "Alternative Medicine@" link, and looking at the actual page where you ended up. This is another way in which taxonomy is not always straightforward. While it is true that pharmacists and homeopaths agree that one is not a "subclass" of the other, it is also true that "subclass" and "superclass" are concepts ("ideals") -- mental constructs. Since not everyone constructs the same mental model of the world, we often include these "@-links" to accommodate conceptualizations that don't match the "standard scientific" model. For instance, Archaeology (like other Science categories, but where I happen to edit) has a similar @link to an "Alternative Views" containing sites that Archaeologists would almost universally agree in not calling "Archaeology" ("crackpot" might be the preferred term.) I edit there partly because I have read enough that I can generally distinguish between mainstream and idiosyncratic views. The ODP taxonomy reflects the mainstream view (in most respects this would be as taught in any reputable college or university on any continent) in generally objective terminology, and where possible supports alternate conceptualizations via these "virtual subcategories." (This is of course not the only use for @-links. Sometimes there are several generally-acceptable alternative subcategorizations, and @-links are also needed to support that. But where there is one mainstream and one non-mainstream subcategorization, the @-link will generally be used for the non-mainstream approach.)