hutcheson

Had you considered selling your domain name?

My take on the site is that a "directory" with only one agency in each town (or at least the ones I checked) is not going to be taken seriously as a directory by either editors or users. The ODP incorporates its own, rather more comprehensive, directory of Real Estate sites in that region. Ergo, insufficient content to be listed.

Re: I can not understand it... First, you can't "insist" on a listing at all, let alone a listing in any particular category. There may not BE a category at all. But the site LOOKS like a retail site. Why not add information (that is, prices!) so it will better fulfill its function of soliciting buyers, AND will meet the requirements to be listed in a retail (Shopping) category? Se

Re: I can not understand it... Well, the distinction is not so clear in practice as it is in theory -- and some sites cross boundaries. No great harm done -- the vast majority of sites submitted from the outside are to the wrong category anyway. We continually urge editors to try to find the right category. (This, by the way, is a service you will conspicuously NOT get for free submissions from your friends at Yahoo!)

>>As a result, I'd advise you to submit again. Huh? I'd have given exactly the opposite advice. "The site hasn't been reviewed yet. So there's no need to submit again. It's still waiting." Now, if it HAD been rejected, for some invalid or questionable reason, there would be reason to resubmit, perhaps after improving navigation so that the unique content was clearly visible. But in the circumstances as described (you submitted, it hasn't been processed) submitting again will just generate a "duplicate submission" to be deleted.

Re: I can not understand it... No. It's not a "recreation" site. It's a commercial site.

First, submitting twice to the same category won't get you blacklisted, although the editor will probably sign or sneer at you. (Just two submittals hardly rates even that--just another bump-and-click at the old salt mine.) But there's no point to it, unless you like mildly irritating editors. Second, your claim that such a feature would prevent multiple submissions betrays an, um, naivete that is astonishing to those of us who deal with multiple submissions. Fact is, creators of most of the multiple submissions (which is not the same as "most creators of multiple submissions", note well) can't be deterred by anything short of gross physical violence. Trust me. We've tried. And at this point I think that there is a certain amount of reluctance to make internal ODP communications of any kind openly available. We know, for instance, that the most malicious and deceptive spammers try to get information like this, to redesign their abusive submission programs to avoid kinds of detection that they know we can do automatically.--and I'm not sure that the information you want couldn't be used to advantage bu such people. Third, the ODP has a small technical staff. Well, I really don't know how small he is, but he can hold "technical staff meetings" in a phone booth or shower, whichever is more convenient. Variations of this idea have been floated before as technical enhancements (it may be a good idea), but I suspect it is not a high-priority idea.

Re: I can not understand it... "E-mail us for prices." Um, for shopping, you gotta have the prices on the site that wants to be listed in shopping. Otherwise it's not a shopping site, it's just a marketing site -- which we don't list, just like TV Guide doesn't provide a schedule of Beer Commercials by brand. If you have a walk-in place of business (I didn't notice a mention of it in my brief look at the site), you could submit to a Regional category, presumably the Locality where the shop is located.

Dunno nerves, but a cast-iron stomach is definitely a requirement.

jayjay, this stuff is not common. I've contacted more people than most editors have, and I haven't been mugged yet. But, if you do 20,000 edits, contact 5% of the webmasters, and 1 tenth of one percent of them turn out to be psychotic (a conservative estimate in some areas;)), well...do the math. So the rule is hard and fast: As an editor, you can take whatever risks you wish. But you can't give out information that would impose ANY risk on another editor, without their permission.

Here's a reasonable protocol. 1) Don't expect a response. Editors have been threatened, cyber-stalked, subjected to real-life hassles, etc. They may want to keep their privacy. 2) Don't repeatedly contact the same editor, unless they reply. 3) Give the editor a week or three to respond. We don't all edit every day -- or every week. 4) If one editor doesn't respond within two or three weeks, try another one, perhaps on a higher category. Repeat until you get to the top of the category hierarchy. I think this protocol will keep you from being perceived as a vicious spammer (because of your e-mail, at least.) Generally, forums like these are best if they can accomodate your question -- this way, every editor that's willing to respond can, and perhaps not lose as much privacy in the process.

Still waiting on review. No need to resubmit.

>>Only the product line is same, but otherwise the company address & all the other details are different. This, if you'll excuse the direct approach, does not make it a unique site. It makes it APPEAR that someone else, not the company itself, is trying to steal the company's customers by misdirecting them to some other contact, using a plagiarized and forged website. (Yes, we have seen other attempts to do this, and yes, we have to watch out for it.) This is not a case where you could persuade editors to add an inappropriate site. This is a case where you could learn how to begin to rebuild trade-india's reputation as a reliable submitter of legitimate sites.

Re: My only problem >>I presume that these folks get banned just as quickly bait-and-switch ones, if not quicker. And just as permanently. But please do not use the word "folks" for these, um, toxic cyanobacteria.

There's a general principle here that is frequently misunderstood. A site that contains many of subsites for specific entities is not considered a "single site." It's considered a "Web Host that doesn't provide individual domain names for its customers." Geocities is the classic "personal home page" site, but there are many others, some concentrating on specific industries, others (like trade-india) concentrating on specific regions. The "individual sites without individual domain names" should be considered for listing on their merits -- in Topical, Regional, World categories, whatever. But they need to be unique content. A page for a business is not "unique content" if the business has its own site with the same information. Trying to supplant the business's own site is a form of abuse, and reflects badly on the "web host" and ALL its submissions--even the ones that might turn out to be legitimate (of which, for the record, there are many at trade-india.)

Re: My only problem I don't see this as a problem. Webmaster wants a site listed, although it is against guidelines (or, as is often the case, isn't even there yet.). It gets quite properly deleted. Webmaster has gotten three things: 1) a free site review, 2) a rejection, and 3) a reputation as an unreliable submitter. Well, the last two, at least, richly deserved. The backlog is caused by the spam submissions. NOT by webmasters fixing up their sites afterward. Suppose, in fact, the webmaster changes the site. Now, in the course of searching for useful websites, some editor may find and list it. Or any non-editor, including webmaster or paid agent, may submit it again. It may get reviewed, and if so, the earned reputation may get it a less favorable review. This all seems just and fair. Something we DO see is people creating sites to get accepted, and then changing them -- removing the content, adding browser-busting or bandwidth-hogging noise or even illegal content. This is called "bait-and-switch", and justly earns as close to an eternal ban as we can implement--the heat death of the universe unfortunately constraining the course of justice in this case.

>>If someone enters "teapot", "Chinese teapots", or even "YiXing teapots", our site won't turn up. That's what I'm concerned about. Don't be. Nobody uses dmoz search but editors and anxious webmasters. Make sure your site is Google-ready -- that's free, and consider buying your way into the other real search engines. Dmoz search probably won't return you more than one real customer a, um, decade.

>>I'm just list in odp, and discover the page where i am has a very low PR Optimizing the PR of specific DMOZ categories is, to put it lightly, not one of our design goals, nor is it a criterion for changing the directory taxonomy. Outside links to dmoz.org pages can raise their page-rank, but if we think a category has the wrong name or location, we'll change it without being concerned about how many outside links are lost. Usability is a major criterion, and internal links between ODP categories are Good Things. We need lots more of them: in fact, I need to go add some more today. But adding them to manipulate page rank would, I believe, be considered abusive editing.

>>I believe that if someone is spamming the ODP they should be removed for a year, if they keep it up they should be banned permanently! Well, for extreme cases something like this is possible. But it has to be pretty extreme. There are all kinds of, um, supererogatory submissions. Some of them are due to sheer stupidity. (Internet MLM schemes, for instance, tend to draw from the bottom of the gene pool.) Some are ignorance -- perfectly competant and honest businessmen not knowing enough about the internet, or search engines, or hierarchical directories, to understand what kind of submission makes sense. Some of the sites are innocent victims of venal and/or incompetant professional site promoters. Some may be software glitches -- either ODP or some site submission program. And, after all, the ODP is in the business of listing sites for surfers, not of executing justice. But if you want to understand the nature of the difficulties to be overcome in creating a comprehensive web directory that accepts free submissions even from commercial sites, the fact that site submission can't include either an IQ or ethics check on the submitter, must be considered.

The submittal guidelines do well to strongly suggest only one submittal -- in view of the major problem we have with pestilences who submit every page of their site to the same egregiously irrelevant category. But there are specific cases where multiple submissions is OK. 1) If you have content in multiple languages, submit to a category in each language. 2) If you have content that relates, in very different ways, to two completely different and unrelated topics, submit to both topics. The e-text of the well-known best-selling book "Archaeology of Beekeeping" (no, I'm not making this up: I only regret I didn't buy a copy before it went OOP) SHOULD be submitted to both an Archaeological category and an Agriculture category. 3) If the locus of your site is geographically relevant, it SHOULD be submitted to a Regional subcategory, regardless of whether it's submitted to any topical category. Please don't depend on the editor to know exactly where that geographical region is: how many of you could find Tripoli on a map--even if you knew which city was meant? We've got editors from all over the world. Nearly all of them are just as ignorant as you are, of the geography of the world outside the range of their UZI. On the other hand, do you want a quick pass to the spammer's corner? Easily done, in only one or two submissions! 1) Submit a real-estate site to every locality within driving range of your Honda Civic. Submitting twice ANYWHERE is once too many. 2) Submit a "directory" that has hardly anything besides affiliate links. Submitting it once is three too many times. 3) Submit your MLM, or "network-marketing" (or whatever buzzword they're calling these thinly-disguised Ponzi schemes this year, since the reputation caught up with the character of the last buzzword) site outside the MLM category for the relevant company. Just one submission is all it takes: instant fame as a pustule on the body politic! 4) Submit all of the vanity-keyword-packed IP-redirected alias URLs of your site: a pestilential action guaranteed to give the ODP editor the most emphatic initial impression possible of you and your ancestry, ethics, manners, and hygienic habits...although not necessarily the most favorable. But we do promise to give your submissions special attention.

I have about a dozen categories on my dashboard. When I edit, I open about three or four windows, and start each one on whatever activity strikes me at the moment -- a category with lots of robozilla-flagged problems or lots of unreviewed sites, an ongoing project, the day's e-mail, etc. Wherever I go, I tend to pick out the obviously-simple-to-handle cases: egregious mis-submissions, palpable spam, probable-spam, etc. Quite often such cases turn out to be unexpectedly complex -- the same abuser is pestering other categories also, and the problem needs to be addressed everywhere. In any case, that window remains devoted to that task till I go to a site that crashes the window, or I get bored with that kind of site (or that kind of problem.) Go ahead -- model that on your computer. (It wouldn't be that hard, actually.) Now try to base a prediction on it, remembering well that as the number of greens gets smaller, so does the chance I'll work on the category (either because I wasn't alerted to it in the first place, or having been alerted, was distracted by psychological or technical circumstances.) I think (because of the number of random factors, and the positive feedback correlated to large numbers of greens) you'll find that you'll get almost the same predicted date for any category to which I have access. Now, I'm an editall. Go figure. Here's the real problem: I just spent 4 hours today dealing with submissions. Do you know how many actual sites I listed? Zero. I spent about 4 hours yesterday, although I think I actually listed a couple of sites. That works out to over 90% of the time spent dealing with spam. Other editors' mileage will vary, but I suspect that for most active editors, there will be a similar proportion. That means that the wait for site listing, however long it is, is at least ten times longer than it would be if it weren't for the spam submissions. Now, all of you who are concerned about these delays and yet don't have time (or the grammatical proficiency) to be editors: go out and do something constructive about it: find a spammer and break all the bones in his fingers. The world will thank you. And if enough of you do the socially-conscious thing, eventually the backlog will get shorter.

>>For a couple of years our sites were listed as #1 or #2 ... It is very important to remember that ODP search DOESN'T RANK SITES! It returns the sites in some random order, and nobody has ever published any kind of rationale for that order (or any way to affect that order, favorably or not, for any site). You could have the best "Chiral Handcrafted Widgets" in this arm of the galaxy, listed in 17 categories, cooled in 8 of them, deep-linked 400 times -- and STILL end up showing after some thirteen-year-old-kid's Madonna fan site containing nothing but a picture of her pretending to do something obscene with a CHW. Trust us on this. No real search engine is going to do anything with dmoz.org's search results. They pay the big bucks for the directory and the links. And as for searchers, hardly anyone but ODP editors and webmasters does searches here. Now you can get an amazing amount of information out of that primitive search tool, if you know a bit about ODP. And I personally do use ODP search to actually find sites...sometimes the sites that I know I added last year. But I very much doubt if there are more than 100,000 people who have EVER used ODP search for general web searching. (Yahoo will have that many unique visitors in an afternoon.) And, last time I saw "page views" figures for ODP, "approximately all" of the day's page views could have been accounted for by the number of listings added by editors that day. So, don't worry about trying to optimize for ODP search -- it won't work and wouldn't matter if it did. Concentrate on Google and Inktomi, with an eye out for new search engines.

First, "good reason" is the meta's personal judgment as to whether the author of the application is likely to be helpful or harmful. Obviously, this judgment isn't infallible. Obviously, two metas may make different judgments. Difficult cases may be discussed, and the meta may do whatever research seems appropriate. But there is no other way. These are the people who review allegations of abuse, and remove abusers. They are our best chance for recognizing patterns of abuse before it gets out of hand. There's an automatic feedback loop here: Metas accept too many "suspicious applications", then they have too much abuse to investigate and don't have time to review applications at all...Metas accept fewer applications, perhaps rejecting the "borderline cases" out of hand -- they have more time to review applications, and can investigate the "borderline cases" further, perhaps finding sufficient evidence of bona fides to accept more of them. It is understandable to feel frustration at not being accepted. But it is only fair to aim that frustration at all the deceptive applications submitted by malicious would-be abusers -- sometimes, as you've seen elsewhere in these forums (and that's not a unique case), hundreds of applications from a single life-form: THAT'S what forces metas to review ALL applications more skeptically.

Like any other ODP user, they have the right to modify listings. But like nearly all other ODP users, they don't bother. What you're seeing is more likely a new change in ODP that Google hasn't picked up yet.

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