hutcheson

Very large queue (over 1000 sites). Very high spam-noise-to-information ratio. If (as I suppose) your business isn't world-wide, you can get a leg up on the rest of the geographically-challenged competition by submitting to the appropriate subcategory of Business/Financial_Services/Mortgages/Regional, since the higher-level category isn't the best fit.

>Won't this affect reviews? It won't affect reviewing time HALF so much as waiting in the wrong category for an editor to send it to the right category to wait. >So my site will be reviewed? Yes. Sometime. >What else should I do? Check back in a month.

>Whether can tell me what my site be different than others. It is no different. Other affiliate sites, if added by accident, can be removed.

Re: Does this site have any chances to be listed i Both the guidelines for editors AND submitters are very clear, specific, and explicit on this kind of site. No.

You might try the "Submission Status" forum for this. Read the forum guidelines first!

Hundreds of sites. _Heavy_ spam -- the MLM scambugs are all telling each other the best way to get leads for new victims is to offer an e-zine.

Re: What to submit http://www.pearson-ranch.com to You could submit either. The editor might change either way, depending on which was considered easier on our users. There are a couple of reasons for preferring the main URL whenever possible -- you never know when someone will take it upon himself to completely redesign the site. On this site, both kinds of content seem easy to find from the home page, so I'd just list (and submit) the home page in both category. Also, you might submit it to the most geographically-specific category possible. That is typically a town or county category.

Re: What to submit http://www.pearson-ranch.com to >For hunting: dmoz.org/Recreation/Outdoors/Hunting/Game/ No. Notice that the listings there, AREN'T websites for single hunting venues. >For horseback riding vacations, I would choose: http:/dmoz.org/Sports/Equestrian/Vacations_and_Touring/Directories/ No, it's a "Ranch", not a "Directory". (The ODP is a directory.) For Elk meats shopping, I would choose: http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Food/Meat/Exotic/ or http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Food/Meat/Jerky/ Not all the meat is Jerky? All of it _IS_ Exotic. That's the first half of the question. (But see below.) For regional listings I would choose... For ranch (horseback riding) info: http://dmoz.or/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_Mexico/Travel_and_Tourism/Lodging/Ranches/ Between this one and the next, this is clearly more specific, and more descriptive of the overall contents of the site -- "Lodging/Ranch" implies a particular _kind_ of outdoor activity, and the description could mention "Offers elk hunting, ..." for hunting: http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_Mexico/Recreation_and_Sports/ >The prior category is in every way better than this one -- more specific and a better match. for shopping: http://directory.google.com/Top/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_Mexico/Business_and_Economy/Shopping/ Compare to the Shopping categories above. The question is, does the ranch ship only to New Mexico, or does it ship to multiple states. If NM-only, then list here only. If it ships outside NM, then list in top-level Shopping (Exotic) only.

>How long is it until queued sites get automatically removed from the waiting list, or can they wait for ever if no-one actually edits the category? There is no automatic removal. They could theoretically wait forever.

>...accept editors but offer them a smaller cat than the one they originally applied for. This is already the practice, if the descriptions look good and a couple of the sites would actually fit a smaller cat. The difficulty here is that the sample URLs are used not only to guage proficiency in the target language, but also understanding of the taxonomy. As the standard rejection letter indicates, these are two of the most common reasons for rejection. Just to make things more difficult, most people that don't have those skills don't recognize that they don't have those skills. (If they knew what they wrote was grammatically nonstandard or ambiguous, then they'd have known not to write it. If they had been able to notice that the ODP doesn't put retail with informational coin collecting sites, they would have realized listing a collector's personal page to the shopping category was a bad idea.) And so people go away thinking "I made C or better in bonehead English all the way through high school. I may not be able to spell "scalar" but I be one. They couldn't reject me for cluelessness vis-a-vis the grammatical aspects of communicating in the indicative mood. Obviously they suspect me of abuse, or they are protecting their own abusive editors." Or people look at a boilerplate list of six reasons for rejection, and say, "How could they reject me? Why, at least two and possibly four of these reasons could never apply to me...they must be lying!" Well, taxonomy is a very concrete application of sets, and set theory is a branch of logic...and a severe deficiency in the capability of logical thought is a good predictor of poor performance at categorizing. If it must be spelled out: even if only ONE of those reasons apply, the application is rejected. But if you can take that list of reasons, and write another application that _none_ of them can fit, well, you may not be accepted, but at the worst, you have a fairly good chance of getting a personal rejection note.

No, it's not in the queue. It had already been listed.

The usual advice: 1) Make sure the new URL is the real one -- if there is redirection involved, redirect from old to new and not the other way round. 2) Make sure the new URL is used in all logos, self-links, etc., on the site. 3) File an "Update URL" request. 4) So long as the old URL works, it's not a high priority for us--it will be treated like any other add or update request. When the old URL stops working, Robozilla will flag the site, and getting the URL correct will become a higher priority.

No, that wasn't what was being said. What was said is that, in the face of "duplicate" (not "higher multiple") submissions, the editor would be unlikely to take any retaliation beyond deleting one of them, and snarling. On the new question you've raised: In some categories (Recipes, Movies) and for some classes of sites (online e-book archives) deeplinks are common practices. For other categories (Real Estate) and types of site (directories, retailers) deeplinks are rare enough that a single deeplink will almost be enough to start an investigation for abuse. The probability of a deeplink being accepted is also related to the distance between the categories. A site listed in a main category should basically NEVER have a deeplink in any of the direct categories. (What, never? well, maybe 1 in 20,000 sites -- it would always be inappropriate to submit such a deeplink.) The same logic goes for "related" categories -- that is, if you can get from one category to another in a click or two, then there's almost never any reason for any single website to be listed in both. If you do submit to both, you should confidently expect one of those submittals to be rejected. (The guidelines say, "submit to THE SINGLE best category for the site. Without some SPECIFIC reason for believing that in the SPECIFIC case multiple listings would be accepted, you should follow the general guidelines. And again, what was said before was just emphasizing the fact that we think it's more important to give our users a comprehensive directory than it is to punish webmasters for having careless, rude, or even malicious site promoters.

Be sure to formally notify their ISP also. Then when the site goes down, an ODP editor will remove the listing while AOL's lawyers are still watching the grass grow.

In order to maintain the meta's reputation for universal benevolence and beneficience, it is necessary for all ODP editors, and all webmasters who wish to retain their ODP listing, to search out this heretic and visit his body with violent and fatal damage, that the world may be made safe and peaceful.

Waiting for review in a very short queue. I can't say with certaintly that that's the right place for it, but it is a reasonable place to start. I wouldn't recommend resubmitting elsewhere.

Yes, I'm on the "Gnomic" side of my mood swings.

>a better way of handling the situation to prevent spam should be found. I may strongly agree with you, but I will fight to the death to deny your right to say it. Unless you understand the problems and the technology well enough to know that there _is_ a better way, it's a very inane thing to say. But there have been concrete proposals (or at least very viscous proposals) made by a number of people, and I think we are in the way of finding a better way.

>And remain there foreever? In most cases, no. Sometimes they move directly to the Misplaced Submissions queue to fossilize.

1) Make sure the old URL redirects to the new URL, returning the "permanent redirect" code. 2) Make sure the site mentions only the new URL in all links, self-description, etc. 3) file an "Update URL" request on the OLD URL, giving the NEW URL in that field on the form.

Re: Suggestion to help remove stale links from DMO I don't want to be seen to throw water on what is IMO a _most_ desirable feature, but: -- You don't want to e-mail the editor--who may not be active anyway; you want to go into the queue with Robozilla's bad-URL alerts (which non-editors don't see, but which get higher priority treatment than either unreviewed sites or e-mails to editors. (That's a technical issue, probably a very minor one that Netscape Staff could easily fix.) -- Where are you envisioning this link as integrated into dmoz.org? Netscape sees the ODP as producing the RDF, which people like Google can use so long as they put the "Add URL" and "Become an editor" links. I don't think even "Update URL" is required. So, assuming that most users who spot bad links will spot them at AOL or Google, who don't have to add anything to their screens, how could the ODP roll out this feature so that the people who need to see it (and I agree they are legion) will see it? Perhaps a "test implementation" could do something like insert posts in a thread in these forums, which moderators could delete as they were checked?

>Does this mean it will be a while still until its reviewed? Tea leaves, mon, tea leaves are the only way to go. Tarot readings are too dramatic, and those unreviewed numbers just don't correlate with _anything_.

Waiting for review with about a hundred other sites. Since there is a clear regional focus (right?), don't forget to submit to http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/California/Counties/Orange/Recreation_and_Sports/ , which has no backlog at all.

"Lowballing" (in the internet directory context) is the practice of creating lot of sites with the absolute minimum of content in order to garner lots of listings. "Spam" -- repeated submittals that deliberately flout the directory guidelines in the interests of someone other than the surfers. The point is not to destroy your reputation, but to allow you to rebuild it.

So your clients are happy. They pay the bills, you serve their interests. The business model is not unusual, and it needs neither defense or criticism here. But, as with assassins, every elated client corresponds to a disappointed victim -- unwanted promotional copy when they sought information, pages of advertisements masquerading as "incomplete but closed" directories where they looked for service providers, in short, "stones for bread." The ODP doesn't list masons in the "Bakers" category. If you provide advertising and promotional services to businesses, then you should submit your site (ONE site, not every page of a client list placed on a separate domain and submitted separately!) to a category that includes masons, um, advertising and marketing firms.