A simple suggestion on tracking submissions

Thank you very much for the time and effort to maintain this excellent directory.

However, It is honestly very frustrating to try and figure out what is going on with a submission. I have never gotten any indication that the editor has received it or that it is in the queue.

It seems like it would be very simple to write a very rudimentary shell script to send out an email upon sucessful submission and then at periodic intervals (maybe a week or 2) simply stating that the submission is in the queue and roughly how many other submissions are in front of it. I'm sure the talented people who built the software for this complex directory could whip out such a script in very short order. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

While I'm sure everyone understands and appreciates the time and effort required to be an editor on a project of this magnitude it simply seems a matter of common courtesy to provide a little information on the status of a submission. Also, since the process would be automated it would eliminate the need to manually answer the submission status forum, as well as what is probably a flood of emails from people who wonder if their submissions are even being considered.

Thanks very much for your constructive suggestion - I will bring it up for discussion and see whether something along these lines is feasable.

Some reasons why many editors are against this kind of idea:

If you tell a spammer that you've just deleted their submission from unreviewed then you're reminding them to go and resubmit.

Most editors do not edit submissions in date order - rather they make the easiest edits first, e.g. ***correct titles and descriptions*** plus noted and obvious spammers, misplaced submissions, foreign-language submissions etc. So the concept of "how many people are ahead of me" is meaningless.

There's a confirmation page that says your submission was accepted and waiting for review. For people who are more bothered, there's this very useful board here.

However, as alucard noted, it's always valuable to have constructive and helpful suggestions of ways to improve the system. Thanks! <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

This is not the first time this has been suggested, but, because of the reasons that have been given, I don't think it will be implemeted.

Who should the email go out to? The address as typed into the submission form, postmaster@domain.com (where domain is the submitted domain?), or what? I can see multiple verification problems here, as well as increased server loading. God knows that the server is already strained fit to bust already.

These are all excellent points. However, they all have answers. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

The number of people ahead of me is not meaningless. I would assume that the spammers are deleted as they are found and the foreign submissions are routed to other queues. The fact that submissions aren't edited in date order is not a problem either. Basically you aren't promising anyone a strict FIFO quene but at least people could see that an active editor is actually doing some work and people would be less likely to panic. After all, I think everyone realizes and appreciates that editing is a very labor intensive job. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

The confirmation page is a nice feature to be sure but the email suggestion I made is far more reliable on 2 fronts. 1) The user has positive proof that the editors actually have his correct email address to facilitate communication. 2) The person submitting the website will need to give a real email address. This could be used to verify that a person is the one making the submission. For example you could have included in the email a graphical numeric entry field such as those used by Yahoo to help verify that a human is actually the recipient of the email and not an automated spamming bot.

The submission status posting board is a nice touch but it requires someone with editorial privileges to read the post, look up the status of the submission, and post a response. In addition, it seems like a spammer's paradise because he can see what sites are in the queue of sites submitted. The status of a submission seems like it should be a little bit more private between the editorial staff and the submitter.

It seems to me that your main concern is with the spammers and they are a problem for everyone on the internet. However, there are very simple ways to deal with them as well. First, you can add measures such as graphical numeric fields to make automatic submissions more difficult. Second, you can limit the number of URL's allowed from a given IP address to say 3 per day. No reasonable person could oppose waiting 1 more day to submit additional URL's but it would make a "Submit your site" spammer's life more difficult. Finally, the confirmation email I suggested would require the spammer to actually read the email and what million site submission spammer is going to want to do that?

A later post opines that my email tracking suggestion would overload the servers but I would suggest that the opposite is true. Sending an email is a very low impact activity compared to submitting a cgi post. By limiting the number of submissions per day per IP address you can drastically reduce the overload on the cgi server not to mention the editors.

These suggestions do not hurt legitimate submitters at all and, in fact, give him a warm fuzzy that his submission hasn't fallen into a black hole. The spammer on the other hand would see his work become much more complicated. And if the spammer's job is harder the editor's will become easier. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

1) The user has positive proof that the editors actually have his correct email address to facilitate communication.

Click to expand...

Since editors rarely contact submitters or even respond to submitter emails, that's largely a neglible point.

In any case, as has already been noted, this isn't really a new suggestion. I'm sure it's somewhere on the long list of enhancements to consider implementing, though you'll appreciate that it's likely a very low priority.

We've discussed various types of automatic reporting. The people who have read this will probably pick up some of the ideas the next time it's discussed.

At this point, it's fairly low on a fairly large list of priorities for staff (and for editors.)

I don't think you understood the value... It isn't important if the editors respond to the submitter's emails.

The point is that the submitter can see that his submission is still live and that there is an active editor at work.

How many submissions per day are simply resubmits because someone thinks his submission has simply dropped into a black hole somewhere. Read through a few of the submission status posts and you will see frustrated people who only want a quick update on their submission so that they can make some plans. All I have suggested is a simple automated solution to this problem.

I think that if you gave the suggestion a chance that the overloaded servers would be a little less overloaded.

1) Resubmits to the same category overwrite the old submission.

2) As soon as a site is edited (listed, commented on or deleted) in one category, an editor coming across it in another category can see that it's listed in two places and may delete it from the least appropriate category. This doesn't take much time and internal processes make it easy to spot.

3) Aside from knowing that your site was successfully submitted, and I am well aware that there have been recent problems with this, how does it change your activity or plans at to whether the site gets listed in the ODP? If the site is listed then what can you do that you couldn't do before? If the site isn't listed then what does that stop you doing?

What you should do is simple:

1) Submit your site to the most appropriate category. Confirm that it was submitted correctly - if you saw the confirmation screen then that's enough.

2) Forget about it.

3) Get on with developing and promoting your site in other ways, like carrying out a links campaign, writing more content, looking into advertising and promotion etc.

One day you'll hopefully spot an ODP listing in your backlinks - that's a nice thing and can help your profile and traffic, but it's not the be all and end all of web site promotion. This is really why e-mailing submitters is not that big a deal - it doesn't make any difference other than making them feel more in control.

I suppose we could construct a death analogy. We don't know in advance when it's going to happen. We know that one day it will. I could get a regular update from my doctor confirming that I was indeed getting older, other people around me were dying and that yes, I could die tomorrow, or then again I might die when I'm very old. He could tell me that there are 30 million people older than me but that they probably won't die in order of age. None of that tells me what I want to know, which is when I will die so that I can make plans.

Do I keep checking with my doctor to make sure all this getting older and stuff is happening? Well I could, but it wouldn't be of much use to me and it certainly doesn't help me make any plans. So I forget about dying and get on with my life. One day I'll die and, like my ODP listing, I'll probably find out first on Google...

hoosier, as a few people have mentioned already this isn't a new idea, it's just not high on the list of priorities. You might think that we are being negative about this, but it really just comes from the fact that it has been discussed to death internally. We want something like this as well, but we need to do other things first. Resources are very limited here so things have to be prioritized. At the moment the top priority is the enhancements to the servers. We don't have the entire tech team at AOL-TW working on the ODP <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

hoosier, as you see there are many opinions, both positive and negative, on this subject. I want to reiterate thanks for your suggestion - there is a discussion going on in our internal forums about some ways of achieving the effects you desire without some of the drawbacks. As others have said, though, given the amount of work going on right now to deal with bugs and some other major things internally, it might be a while before this gets addressed.

But that doesn't mean that your suggestion is a bad one. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />