hutcheson

Re: Help for changing the description BTW, I agree that the last description is not bad. You could also say something about what the web site contains...product catalog, online sales? My point about the regional listing is not _in place of_, but _in addition to_ the topical listing. Does the company hire employees? does the site give employment information? -- if so, then it has a distinct interest for _local_ job seekers, and ought also to be listed in a local category.

>Have been into Philately since 1963. Philatelic journalist, since 1978. Editor since 1984. Ah, a professional editor. Admittedly imperfect, and honest also? Check out our editing guidelines. I bet you could follow them if you wanted to. Would you be interested in a high-paying job editing a small stamp category in a large web directory? Well, to be perfectly honest, not all that high paying...

Read the submittal guidelines. They will tell you exactly what the status of this submittal is.

Hmm. You might consider reading the editor's guidelines and resubmitting. There isn't a single word in that description that either gives information OR complies with the guidelines. A: omitted--if there were two sites, there'd be two listings. The guidelines recommend omitting the subject of the verb anyway, since the site title is the obvious subject. Humble: the mind boggles. Saved on a happy hard disk by contented electrons, and presented by righteous photons. You really know how to hit the absolutely wrong note from the beginning. resource: a deprecated term because insofar as it means anything (which it usually doesn't), nobody can tell what it does mean. site: doh, this is like a web directory, all we list are sites (well, or newsgroups, but they're listed separately. for stamp collectors: first, this is false: I'll bet you anything you care to mention that you have nothing about the site that detects visitors' hobbies, much less excludes them based on their choice of hobbies; second, even if it were true, we wouldn't care; third, what does this tell people that anyone couldn't have figured out from the category name? worldwide: First, how is the site different in this respect from any other site on the W.W.W? Secondly, it is really false since you don't provide something most people in the world can read anyway (probably because you are linguistically challenged just like most of the rest of us.) But: does the site have _any_ content at all? Or is it just emotions poorly directed at a poorly defined audience? Now, your site will probably get reviewed, no matter how uninformative and inane the description is -- believe it or not, we've seen worse (in fact, this isn't that far down the underside of the Bell curve. But it will get reviewed much more quickly and sympathetically if the description suggests what the reviewer should be looking for: pictures, focus, and/or catalog of personal collection? Sales, trades, want list, historical trivia, links, -- whatever. But go ahead, resubmit. Don't worry about losing your place in the queue. With that other description, editors would have had to wait to review it until they had a barf bag handy anyway.

Re: Help for changing the description You can submit whatever descriptions you want. But ... Let me _strongly_ encourage you to drop this BEFORE someone reviews the _current_ listing, which IMO already has too many keyword repetitions to be acceptable. It's a WEBSITE description, not a CORPORATE PRODUCT CATALOG. On the other hand, you mention "India" -- Have you submitted the site to a category under Regional/Asia/India?

SEO is kind of a misnomer, like "OEM", since the Search Engine is in fact being victimized, not optimized. It is "Search Engine Results Placement" that is being accomplished. Hence the more accurate terms "SERP Professional" or "SERP Optimizer" or (in a less charitable mood) "SERP perp."

The point of editor bookmarks categories here isn't so much what you can do in them, but how you can use them to build the Directory while waiting for permission to edit real categories. If you are trying to convince a meta-editor that you are just the editor the Widgets/Chiral/Handcrafted/ category needs, then a WCH subcategory in your bookmarks -- containing every specialist craftsman's website that you could find in Google, etc., with good titles and descriptions -- is the best evidence you could possibly have. It is as if you walked into a potential employer and handed over a portfolio, saying "If I'd been working for you for the last month, this is what I'd have done."

As long as it's still in the queue, the problem is more likely uninterested editors than non-disinterested editors.

Re: Our Website Was Considered "Spammy" OK, it's in a very short queue. And by "very short" I mean that I reviewed all the _other_ submittals. I do appreciate your attitude. Evidently, you figured out that what we do basically, compare _every_ site to the others submitted to that category -- and other categories, till we find the right place to list it, or decide it doesn't add value to what we already have. Why review all the _others_? Well, I'm no expert on Shopping/Health, and there may be something I'm overlooking on this site. (I do think the changes you made are improvements. And I do appreciate your attitude, and your client's.) But I _do_ know _some_ spam when I see it sometimes, and the _other_ stuff was fresh off the Hormel truck. I'll give the local experts a week or so to review it (with less distractions). But do check back here again in, say, a couple of weeks if it's not listed yet.

Re: DMOZ Submisson Status There are lots of reasons. Not all ODP licensees include the foreign-language categories, so people submitting from there don't see any other options. And our @link farms aren't as comprehensive as they should be, so sometimes people start browsing down the wrong category, and have no way of getting over to where they should be. I consider these badly submitted sites to be a service to us -- telling us where we should have been adding @links. (We take whatever help we're offered.) Some people can't sort beans by color. This doesn't mean they can't function normally in some niche in society, or that they can't provide valuable commercial services. (And, face it, even good bean-sorting takes some skill and practice, which most people have never had.) There are some people who are too lazy to submit their site to the right place, it might take 5 minutes of their time. They don't consider that they might be losing three months to three years of site promotion because they are giving the site to editors who have much more important and interesting things to do, rather than editors who want to list that kind of site. I'd call this "antisocial" rather than either "malicious" or "stupid", although you could argue that rudness is an ethical issue as well as a sapiental one. I'd call it "shortsighted" too. But that doesn't mean they haven't done us a (very small) service, in pointing out a site we didn't have already. Some people are just too stupid to be allowed to use a keyboard -- but there are no laws against them owning one: so the cons that start scams like "sixfigureincome" make a lot of money off of subhuman stupidity and cupidity. And we see all the time wasted in yet more websites with copies of the same old scams. We have to be able to handle these: it's a universal law: stupidity causes problems for everyone around the perpetrator. And there's no cure. Some people are actually doing what they were taught in marketing class. There was the pestilential pencil retailer that submitted his site to Arts/Literature/Authors because authors needed writing paraphernalia -- he thought he was "targeting his audience" or some such tomfoolery. Again, just because they've been trained to be pests doesn't mean their sites shouldn't be listed. Some are just plain malicious, but (when given full credit for lack of skill, stupidity, or misunderstanding) this is really a _very_ small group. I'd estimate well under 0.1% of all submitters. They do cause disproportionate trouble -- on some days, certainly over 20% of all submittals. All of which says, as bad as the submittal queues may seem at times, they probably work about as well as they could. And they do provide a significant proportion of all ODP listings. (The ODP might still be bigger than Yahoo without them, but it wouldn't be much bigger.)

Re: Our Website Was Considered "Spammy" >I simply cannot believe that this decision was based on the actual content and design of the website. I can. It really does come across as being a marketroid's imitation of a marketroid's concept of a scientific site. We see a _lot_ of them, and to people like me (no marketing experience whatsover, but a great deal of scientific reading) the contrast is obvious. It would be like me trying to fool a native speaker of German that I sprachen sie Deutsch. I might be able to fool another monolingual American, but the Germans would be scratching their heads in puzzlement, or rolling on the floor laughing. But I repeat, the site should be judged on its Shopping content, since it is a shopping category, and the next reviewing editor (did I mention it had been put back in the queue for review) will have access to this thread. You may not be able to do anything about the marketrish language, but I would again recommend putting something bout the uniqueness of the products you offer. The editor can then pick on that product, look out on the net to see if anyone else offers it. If Google or Inktomi doesn't find anyone else, then it's almost a cinch to list the site.

For timeout problems, we don't have a solution. Try at different times of the day, and hope the hackers get tired of hitting the server, or hope the technical people get a handle on the proxy servers being used.

Re: DMOZ Submisson Status OK, 200 unrevieweds moved out. This includes affiliate, MLM, and ponzi scammers; the providers of wood, wood cutting equipment, fireplaces, furniture, molybdenum, epoxy; the tanning salons, realtors, and neighborhood watches, sites in German, French, Spanish, Russian, and various languages I can't identify, let alone read.... Maybe half of the ones left are plausible candidates for this category. So, the latest news: over 300 unreviewed, many not appropriate, and your submittal is still there. Don't get the wrong impression from these numbers. I did the EASY stuff, the "Make $5000.00 monthly from your home without doing ANYTHING!" "The SixFigureIdiot program that teaches you how to achieve all your dreams of avarice".... etc. The rest is going to be harder work, and another 50-200 of them are going to turn out to be the same garbage, only better shrouded and disguised.

Re: DMOZ Submisson Status Augh. Over 500 unreviewed, and most of those are toxic-waste-scum spam. I'll take a pass through and try to leave a stream of unreviewed that a small-business-minded editor wouldn't mind reviewing. But at best this may take awhile. Do you meet clients face to face in your office or theirs? And does your website mention the area in which you work? If so, please also submit to your locality's business&economy category, which will probably get reviewed more quickly.

Let's look at this problem a slightly different way. You can't choose which URL will be listed. You can only ask that a site be re-reviewed, and you can give reasons for that. When you ask, the editor will go to the OLD URL. If it still works, and if nothing at THAT site says "we prefer to use some NEW URL....--- then the editor will NOT change. On the other hand, if the editor goes to a site, and sees evidence that that URL is not the main URL, then they should change, regardless of the fact that no update URL request was made. So: make sure the WEBSITE clearly indicates ONE primary URL, and then ask for it to be re-reviewed, mentioning that (you think) the URL should be something different. Remember that the "add URL" and "update URL" features are NOT FOR WEBMASTERS. Webmasters are not allowed to use them. Only people are allowed to use them! If you don't tell us you're the webmaster, we won't ask, we'll just assume you're human because you know how to use the keyboard. Remember, AS A WEBMASTER you have absolutely NO rights of access. It is as a person, just like any other person, that you are a party to the social contract. We know perfectly well that the chances are 300 million to 1 AGAINST the submitter and webmaster being the same. (OK, maybe self-interest affects the odds a little.) But I trust you get the point. We won't do ANYTHING to a listing because someone asks for it; we do it only because after reviewing the site it seems the right thing to do.

The important part is that the submittal has been added to the list to be reviewed. The "cannot verify IP address" means that it went into a "prereview" queue, where we take a quick look with intention of moving it on to the right category for review. Don't worry. Be happy. Well, be paitent. I'm working on those prereviews in a couple of other browser windows even as we speak.

You're asking the question wrong, and you're asking it in the wrong place. Read the posting guidelines, and check out the other forums.

Just tell us _all_ the various URLs that you've submitted for this site, and we'll tell you which one was listed. Or if your records aren't that complete -- some people don't write that stuff down -- just tell us the domain names you've registered for this site. [Edited] With the history of this site and its submittals, it will be very difficult to show good faith on your part. Complete full disclosure in the first response is the only approach that has any chance of succeeding.

You were under the impression that this website was the sole online presence of the company that makes or purchases these medical supplies, sets the prices, and sells and ships them to customers? You've been conned.

Not waiting review there, no evidence that it has ever been reviewed. I'd suggest re-submitting.

The supplier is listed, but under another URL. So this URL won't be listed.

Re: Our Website Was Considered "Spammy" I think you've done the best thing you could do: post here, with a pointer to the claimed unique content. (The usual caveats apply: no site is guaranteed a listing, just a review. If the site is not listable on its merits, then aggressively promoting it can't help it.) Based on what I saw of the site, I can see your position: it really doesn't include the gross technological forms of spam. That is something worth doing, and it really does make the site look more professional (which is, however, not quite the same as being listable.) On the other hand, I can see where the editor got the impression. There's an awful lot of verbiage about "institutional research" but awfully sparse about actual research results. (A little niggling "for instance:" the site mentions adverse effects for several medications, but doesn't give any details or examples except for one of them. The old saw applies: "corroberative detail ... adds verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.") It could leave a impression of a clueless marketroid winging it with what passes for scientific lingo in marketroid circles (which is, however, not quite the same as _not_ being listable.) The overall graphic design looks at least semi-professional or professional (at least to a junkie with color-impaired graphics sense like me.) But, so long as we can find the content, that doesn't count for much one way or the other. We list some really _ugly_ sites, and we reject some slick ones. _Content_ is king. I would recommend that you mention the "product exclusivity" at the website itself. I poked around and didn't see that information, but I may have overlooked it. [but if two editors overlooked it, your public may miss it also!]

>What about walmart & kmart selling same brand name items, what about radioshack & futureshop selling identical consumer electronics, what about sears & bay selling identical merchandise....are they all UNIQUE? Welcome to Earth! You have much to learn, and Canada is a good place to start: the natives are friendly, and many Earthling products and services are available there. On this planet, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Sears, and Radio Shack all offer unique goods and services; futureshop offers unique services, and eBay offers unique services and hosts unique content.

Trying once again to clear up some confusion: You may use whatever words you wish, but in this forum you need to understand ODP editor terminology. To understand OUR terminology, use these three simples rules: 1) When we see this site, the word we use for the idea invoked by its conceptual similarities to many other sites is "affiliate." 2) This site is a perfect example of the concept we wish to convey when we use the word "affiliate." 3) This site give us exactly the kind of experience we recall when we see the word "affiliate." You may use the word "affiliate" in some other sense, and you may have other feelings when looking at this site. I'm sure that, to you, "affiliate" does not mean "months of precious time and lots of money invested" or "great hopes of fantastic income rolling in without performing any productive action whatever." But you must understand that those are your experiences and emotions, not ours. "Affiliate" is intended to convey OUR experience. As for bizarre notions of ODP editor prejudices: please feel free to do ALL of the following, and please be assured that ODP editors will not be concerned about any of them. -- live in whatever city you wish -- spend your time doing whatever you choose. -- spend your money however you wish -- want whatever amount of money you think you need for any purposes -- use vocabulary and terminology however you wish -- start and/or engage in whatever businesses you wish to engage in. -- buy domains in whatever country you wish -- build whatever websites you want to build Your site has been reviewed. It was not rejected because you lived in Canada, or we did not like the domain name, or we didn't like the site design, or we thought your greed excessive, or because we didn't like your business model. It was rejected simply because it had no unique content. We list websites with unique content. Multiple editors made serious efforts -- FAR beyond what the site was worth -- looking for something unique. It isn't there, as you know, because you know where you copied the content from. So, what exactly could we be looking for if we reviewed the site again?

What has been said already is true. ASP stands for Active SERVER Pages, not "Avoid Standard Protocols". The SERVER bit means that whatever programs are executed CAN be done on the server. But if you are doing CLIENT-side Visual-Basic-Scribbling, then (since VB is undocumented and changes randomly from day to day) you may indeed have been trapped into using only certain versions of the INFERNAL EXPLODER -- say, the one SHIPPED with Wind-98. But that's an entirely different issue, and you should tell your VB programmer to check for that in his code. If, on the other hand, you're doing something to the client's computer configuration, using VB (which is perfectly possible, since it's designed to avoid any security the computer's owner may have wished for), then the ODP probably shouldn't list the site at all, or should list it with a notice in bold capital letters: "[WARNING: THIS SITE TAMPERS WITH CLIENT REGISTRY AND SECRETLY INSTALLS SPYWARE PROGRAMS. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, BACK UP ALL YOUR FILES BEFORE VISITING THIS SITE. THE OPEN DIRECTORY PROJECT CANNOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY LOSS OF TIME, DATA, TEMPER, OR DAMAGE TO COMPUTER HARDWARE OR NEARBY CERAMICS IF YOU VISIT THIS SITE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, AND CLICKING ON THIS LINK REPRESENTS YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF ALL THE RISK, DAMAGE, PAIN, AND SUFFERING THAT WILL INEVITABLY ENSUE.]