2 submitters

Just a quick question.

If 2 seperate people submit a website for review (without knowing the other person has submitted too) would that hurt the review process for that website? i.e. would it be considered "spamming"?

I suppose you have a method of collecting IP addresses and can tell that a particular website was submitted from 2 different PCs???

Submitting twice does not hurt. Submitting lots of times might do, but since everybody is allowed to submit sites, even that usually is not a problem.

Thanks for that windharp.

I've seen a couple of sites recently that could be submitted (mainly regional) but have read here that submitting a site for a second time could overwrite the previous description and also change the submission date.

Granted that editors don't have to review in date order (but undoubtedly many do) and that editors will write their own description - but a well written description might be an aid to quicker review.

As I have no idea whether the sites have made their own submission, I have been hesitant about submitting sites and possibly changing what they have written themselves.

I have been hesitant about submitting sites and possibly changing what they have written themselves.

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Don't be. Of the descriptions written by webmasters, a negligible amount are immediately listable. I've only accepted around a couple of dozen in almost 30,000 edits and I expect other editors would say the same. It's so rare, that I usually write to the submitters congratulating them .

I guess the ODP could develop a system that deletes duplicate submissions of a website so only the orignal is visible to editors (should help cut editor workloads a bit). This system could even count number of times that particular website was submitted and flag it as spam if need be.

Not a practical solution, as many times things change after the original submission date -- this is especially true in the cats where waiting times exceed two years.

jimnoble said:

Of the descriptions written by webmasters, a negligible amount are immediately listable. I've only accepted around a couple of dozen in almost 30,000 edits and I expect other editors would say the same. It's so rare, that I usually write to the submitters congratulating them .

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It's about the same ratio here - I recall one in 2000. I suspect in these cases they've actually contacted a sympathetic editor to get assistance.

No, we definitely want to preserve the LATEST submittal. It allows submitters to fix their own errors.

And since we have that already, there's really no point in flagging multiple submitters. We're not the spam cops, all we want is for people to not bother us. If they're not bothering us, why should we bother?

hutcheson said:

No, we definitely want to preserve the LATEST submittal. It allows submitters to fix their own errors.

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Didn't know that...makes sense

hutcheson said:

We're not the spam cops

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So who deals with spam??? maybe the link that say "report abuse/spam" on the top right of all categories needs renaming??

[Edited after rereading hutchesons post]

I think hutcheson in his above post is referring to the way we treat spam. We are annoyed by it, but we don't see ourselves as policemen punishing spammers. We are just librarians, working on a directory of the web.


Indeed I was thinking that the link could use renaming myself, because the percentage of usefull abuse/spam reports is not as high as I think it could be. But renaming won't stop people writing "nice site, visit ***.com which is a nice site, too" or "Why has my site still not been listed?" via this interface. I suppose we could name it to "This is only for debugging reasons, mail you send here will NOT be read" and nothing would change with the reports

Well, we don't want to LIST spam sites, and we welcome anyone's help trying to clean out such sites that slip through.

But so far as punishing sites because their webmasters send nine billion spam e-mails promoting viagra sites -- we don't do that.

And, really, so far as punishing websites because some jerk submitted them over and over again (spamming our site submittal form) we don't WANT to do even that.

In extreme cases, we reserve that right; and we have exercised it.

Fortunately, most sites that the webmaster is so concerned about promoting that he cares nothing for anyone else -- are pretty far down the underside of the border; and most of the rest are merely borderline. In other words, there's a strong correlation between worthless sites and spamming jerks.

Of the few incidents remaining, quite often (for instance) the webmasters can be contacted warning of the potential for harm that they (or their agents) cause. In almost six years, I recall fewer than a half-dozen cases where the spammer could not be dissuaded without ostracizing the site. All the rejected webmasters I've ever seen in the public forums were rejected either (very rarely) by mistake, or (most often) simply because their sites did not contribute to our categories. I remember maybe one case where a webmaster was such a pestilence that even if the site had been listable, it wouldn't have been listed.

So I say we aren't spam cops. If you like, you can call us spam security guards for the ODP parking lot -- we just do what it takes to protect our editors from harassment on the job.