Khym_Chanur

A good reason why there's no such method for viewing a submission's status is because spammers would use it to re-submit as soon as one of their submissions was deleted, and also use it to figure out how to get around our spam-detection methods, both of which would mean more work for us editors.

Re: Status of http://www.candlegalaxy.com submissi It was deleted because Candle Galaxy is owned by NJCandles, which is already listed.

It was deleted for being an affiliate site, since an editor considered all of the links to be affiliate links. From the ODP guidelines:

Well, according to our logs, it was updated, per your request, on 06/20/2002, and again on 01/15/2003; between those dates, two other update requests were denied, because the editor thought that the site was described accurately. So, it the description still inaccurate? If so, how?

Re: Please tell me the status of http://www.webcon Nothing has been done to that submission. The closest parent category with an editor is Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/, and which has a total of over 700 unrevieweds, so it might take a while.

www.screensaver-maker.org is considered to be a deep link of www.shareware4web.com. That is, we consider screensaver-maker.org to be a part of the site of shareware4web.com, even though they have different domain names. The ODP definition for a "site" is somehwat flexible, since we consider domains like Geocities.com to host thousands and thousands of sites, even though it's only a single domain name. And in our definition for "site", a single site can be spread across multiple domains, in which case a link to a one of those other domains would be a deeplink, which we don't list (unless there's some compelling reason to list it). Additionally, the maker of the software, 21hua.com, is already listed, so there's no particular reason for us to list another site whose only purpose is to sell the exact same software.

I think it is, but I'm not sure, since Shopping isn't a category I edit. If the title and description of your submission conforms to guidelines, it might speed things up; there are a number of editors who look through the list of unrevieweds and publish those first, since those take the least amount of time. You could resubmit, but that would send you to the end of the queue; however, that might not hurt, since editors aren't obligated to edit submissions in the order they appear in the queue. Impossible to say. It depends on the amount of time that the primary editors involved with the area spend editing. If they're involved in a project somewhere else in the directory, they might not spend much time in the T-Shirt area. Or they might have recently got something new to do in Real Life, like a new child or a vacation. Then again, another editor might come in and edit some of the unreviewds.

Nothing has been done with your submission, and it sits in unreveiwed with around 300 other sites.

Re: Did I screw up or is iinfosearch.com in the qu It was published in Business/Industries/Security/Special_Services/ on December 6. Your submissions to Business/Industries/Security/Investigation/ and Business/Industries/Security/Investigation/Records_Research/ were deleted.

Nothing has been done with you submission. The closes ancestor category with an editor is Regional/Asia/Malaysia/Business_and_Economy/, which has a total of about 100 other unrevieweds, so it will take a while to get reviewed.

Nothing has been done with it so far, and it is sitting in unreviewed along with about 200 others.

It is sitting in unreviewed, alomg with over 300 other sites. However, the closest parent category with an editor is one category up, and that editors has some other categories with lots of unrevieweds. So, it's going to take a while.

Yes, it does. The editor of any ancestor/parent category can editor there, as well as any editall and meta editors. How long it will take for the editors of an ancestor category to edit the descendant category depends on how busy they are editing overal (which includes things other than looking at unrevieweds), and how much time/effort they're donating to editing. Recreation/Models/RC/Electronics/ is a small enough category that you can probably be granted editorship of it if you apply for it. http://RcBrushless.com/ is sitting in unreviewed; the closest ancestor category which has an editor is Recreation/Models/, and the Recreation/Models/RC/ tree has about 200 unrevieweds in it. http://TheYo.com/ is sitting in unreviewed; the closest ancestor category with an editor is Kids_and_Teens/Computers/, and the Chats_and_Forums/ tree has about 50 unreviewed. Wait, looking at your site, I see that the forum part of it is at http://pub168.ezboard.com/byoyo42048; that is the URL that you want to submit; I doubt that http://TheYo.com/ itself will get listed anywhere in the directory...

The problem is that it takes about a week to generate the RDF dump, so the sole programmer starts it up, waits a week, finds out it doesn't work, tries to fix it, waits a week, see that it didn't work, waits a week... So she's gone through about 12 iterations of the edit-run-debug cycle, and it can take a lot more than that to track down and fix difficult problems.

Nothing has been done with that submission yet. The closest ancestor/parent category with an editor is Regional/North_America/United_States/Virginia/Localities/, which has over 500 other unreviewds, so it will take a while.

The software that the editors use to add, remove, and modify sites and categories, and then turn the internal databases into an RDF dump, is proprietary. On the editor-only forums, we editors semi-frequently ask for it to be made open source, but we've gotten no response on that.

One unreviewed submission was moved on July 30 from Business/Management/Consulting/Business_Relocation to Business/Business_Services/Corporate_Relocation/Moving_Companies/. The Business/Business_Services/Corporate_Relocation/ tree has some 200 unreviewds, but unfortuneatly, the closes ancestor/parent category with editors is Business/Business_Services/, so it will take a while to get listed there. Another unreviewed submission was moved on September 16 from Business/Transportation_and_Logistics/Moving_Services/ to Regional/North_America/United_States/California/Business_and_Economy/Moving_and_Storage/. The closest ancestor/parent category with editors has over 200 unreviewed, so it will take a while to get listed. Unreviewed submissions were deleted six times from Business/Transportation_and_Logistics/, once from http://dmoz.org/Business/Transportation_and_Logistics/Trucking/Truck_Transport/Companies/North_America/United_States/Intrastate/, and once from http://dmoz.org/Business/Transportation_and_Logistics/Distribution_and_Logistics/Logistics/Warehousing_and_Storage/. Please don't submit any more. You can get only one entry in Business/ and one in Regional/; resubmitting isn't going to help you get listed faster.

Re: http://www.maximum-exposure-internet-marketing It was published in Regional/North_America/United_States/Mississippi/Localities/M/Madison/Business_and_Economy/ on November 7. The submission to Business/Marketing_and_Advertising/Internet_Marketing/Marketing_Services/ was moved to Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Promotion/Search_Engine_Optimization_Firms/M/, where, on November 4, it was deleted for having broken links; the services and fees link on the front page is still broken. After you have fixed all of the links on your site, resubmit to the Search_Engine_Optimization_Firms category.

Re: Finally... but... It's a directory, not a search engine. If someone is going to search for the term "rackquetball", they're probably going to use a search engine, rather than searching through a directory. The search function at dmoz.org is only useful for editors, and is very rarely used by end users; additionally, the first two things that such a end user would see would be "Sports: Racquetball" and "Shopping: Sports: Racquetball", the second of which contains your link. Google Directory offers a search feature, but that's because they already have a search engine that they re-use for that purpose; someone doing a search for "racquetball" in Google Directory will find your site, regardless of what's in the title or description.

Re: Finally... but... If the person is browsing through DMOZ, or Google directory, or anything that uses the ODP data, then when they get to Shopping/Sports/Racquetball/, they'll be well aware that it's about racquetball (since that is what the category is about), so it doesn't really matter if the ODP title is Racquetball Authority, RBAuthority, or even Qbuivrhgxzy.

If we cared about that, we'd have to ban any links from sites outside of the Shopping/ and Business/ trees to sites inside those trees (a way too draconian rule), as people who already have a lisitng there could also want to increase their search engine rank, and are probably already doing so; and since there's already a lot of rank obsessed web-masters out there who are likely doing this, prompting MLM site owners to do this by removing their primary listing isn't going to make that much of a difference. However, we do *not* care about search engine placement. We officially don't care. We make a directory, and other people can use it, so long as they follow the Open Directory License. That's all we (officially) care about: making a good directory, and making sure downstream users follow the license. While it may irk us editors that people play games with the directory to tweak PageRank and such, it's against policy to remove such sites, and besides, we have better things to do with our editing time than to figure out if a site's purpose is to influence search engine ranking. We'll only start officially caring about search engine rankings if laws are passed about such rankings, something I feverently hope never happens. The usefuleness of ODP to end-users that is lost by not listing sites such as yours is more than made up for by the editor time freed up by not having to deal with the 99.9% of MLM sites that aren't like yours, time which can be spent editing in other categories. This tradeoff isn't good for your site, but ODP editors are concerned with making the ODP a good resource for end-users, not a good resource for web-masters.

It is sitting in unreviewed with over 100 other sites.

Spammers are much more clever than that.What, exactly, would they do? You said that allowing personal web pages which mention MLMs would be a loophole (or something similar), and I said responded that it's a "loophole" that's easy for editors to deal with; I don't see what else they could do with the allowence for personal pages which allow for mention of MLM. Of course, MLM site owners could submit their ordinary MLM sites all over the Business/ and Shopping/ trees of ODP, but we have ways of dealing with that. One of the purposes of the MLM IR categories was to act as a "lightning rod" for MLM sites, so they wouldn't get submitted to the rest of the directory, but our anti-spam technology has advanced since then, so we no longer need such lightning rods. I agree that it would be difficult to check for unique prices. My main point is that this standard is not required for non-MLM distributors."unique pricing structures, discounts, and so on" is just a way of saying "unique content", which is required of all sites. The vast majority of MLM IR sites have no unique content, so we just give up on the whole area. The editors who deal with non-MLM distributors don't think that the majoirty of non-MLM IR sites are largely identical to each other, so they consider them to have "unique content"; thus, all distributor websites must meet the same standard. If there are non-MLM IR sites that use a cookie-cutter approach to pricing and such, they should be removed from the directory, but such sites don't make up a large enough percentage of site submissions to the point where we'd just want to give up on that particular area.

Re: www.feedmypet.com It's (probably) easier and less time consuming for an editor to[*]distinguish between a personal web page which mentions MLM, versus a personal web page which is mainly about MLM, than... [*]to disginguish between an MLM which offers unique pricing structures, discounts, and so on, versus the run of the mill MLM sites.[/list:u]Also, if spammers create a personal web page which merely mentions MLM, and get that into a personal web page category... Well, they're not going to be very satisfied with that. Of course, they could change their site after it gets listed, but they can pull such bait-and-switch tactics even if all mentions of MLM were prohibited. We don't care about business models in and of themselves, but we do care about the correlations that they have to the work of mainting the ODP. That is, when editing, we don't care if we think a business model is stupid or will quickly lead to bankruptcy (or if we think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread), but we do care if it seems to lead to us spending lots of time finding needles in haystacks when we could instead just ignore that whole area and more fruitfully spend our time editing in other areas.

No, multiple listings won't help, since you won't get them, with two exceptions: [*]If you have a "brick and mortar" off-line store that people can go to, you can get an additional listing in the Regional/ tree. [*]If your site is multi-lingual, you can get one additional listing in the World/ tree for each non-English language your site is available in.[/list:u]