Also Having Submission Problems

Hi,
My site submission form won't go through. I've tried several times the last four days. My site is www.Incomingfreshmen.com. Can anyone give me any advice? Thank you very much.

>> My site submission form won't go through <<

Can you please elaborate on this. What do you mean "won't go through"? What message do you get? Which category have your tried submitting to? What browser+OS (i.e. Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000) are you using?

Just saying "it doesn't work" doesn't really help us advise you in any way, nor track down any potential problem. It's all in the details <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Sorry,
When I press submit, it takes about a minute, then says they were unable to log my ISP and I should try again. It does this every time. I tried to submit to Education&lt;Colleges and Universities&lt;Directories. I have windows XP and Explorer 6. Thank you for your time. <img src="/images/icons/grin.gif" alt="" />

It would have helped if you had copied the exact message you received instead of re-wording it.

If you got the message:
Sorry, we could not determine your IP address for this submission. This may be because your browser or ISP has cached the previous page. Your submission has been redirected to the misplacd submissions folder. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Then there is no need to resubmit as we do have your submission (like the message says). It has just been placed into a temporary holding area ("Misplaced submissions") for checking before being moved to the unreviewed queue of the category you submitted to. See these previous threads for more details.

If however, you received a different message, please tell us EXACTLY what it says. Also, please cut'n' paste the URL of the category you are submitting to. "Education&lt;College" could mean any of (I would guess) a hundred categories, but http://dmoz.org/Science/Earth_Sciences/Education/College/Field_Camps/ makes it obvious exactly which category you meant AND allows an editor to quickly click on the category to see if your site is awaiting review there or not.

Yes,
The message you posted was exactly the one I received. Sorry I didn't copy it exactly. And here is the URL:http://dmoz.org/Reference/Education/Colleges_and_Universities/Directories/
I misunderstood the message after my submission. I thought it meant it was sent to some type of "Submission Graveyard" and was not being reviewed. <img src="/images/icons/blush.gif" alt="" /> In that case, there are several such submissions from myself in that place. I am sorry about that. Thanks again.

Similarly I have tried submitting a site since the middle of last week and I keep getting the following message:
"The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings."
I am using IE 5.5. and have never seen this before, and I haven't changed any settings that I am aware of since my last successful submission to the directory.

The site I am trying to submitt is http://www.lea-cars.co.uk and I have tried several times to submit it to the following category: http://dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/Lancashire/Much_Hoole/

Any advice as to how to get this one submitted would be gratefully received.

Kari

If you look in the previous messages in this forum, you will see that this has been reported several times in the last month.

The advice was, and still is, to submit again using Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, or any browser that isn't Internet Explorer.

Review: A small number of people using IE with certain Security settings, certain proxy and firewall settings, certain ISPs, and on certain days of the week find that they cannot submit to the ODP. No-one has yet managed to come up with a definitive list of circumstances that make it fail, so in the meantime just try again with another browser. People who have done this have all previously reported success when not using IE.

The triggering event may not have been a change in your browser (although you never can tell -- the IE has, among its many nasty habits, a compulsion to surreptitiously download changes to itself). And it may not even BE the browser -- conceivably the problem is in the website itself. (But comparing track records for standards-compliance, I know which direction I'd bet the farm. I think M$ surgically excises any tendancy toward standards-compliance before they let new employees touch the code. Or maybe they just detect and reject.)

All we can say with certainty is, other people having this same problem have gotten around it by either using a real web browser, or tweaking their proxy settings -- and for the average user, downloading Mozilla or Opera is easier.

Hi, Thanks for all the advice about not using IE.... however, I have since tried on 3 separate days using Netscape and now I just get a "connection timed out" error message so I don't think it is just an IE problem. Over the last 3 years I have submitted numerous sites and have never failed to be able to submit them. I haven't got any other connectivity problems and I have to deduce that this is a fault with Open as all evidence points to this. I suppose I will just have to keep trying every day, however, it would appear I am not alone in this, so maybe something can be done to fix it.
Is there anyway my attempts will be logged and regarded as spamming, I am assuming not as the message says "connection timed out"?

Thanks,

Kari

I was having some problems that looked like "timeout" related today (from the editors' side.) I don't believe those are related to the IE-doesn't-know-its-own-IP problem: I wasn't using IE, it was intermittent rather than persistent (as the lost-in-IPspace problem is), and it went away early this afternoon. If that was your only problem, you should be fine to try now.

&gt;I have to deduce that this is a fault with Open as all evidence points to this.

A lot of non-programmers think this way: I couldn't count the number of times I've heard this kind of logic. I could count the number of times it's been VALID. On the fingers of one ... foot. And the result is usually (although not invariably) wrong. (As Turing pointed out, an invariably wrong result is useful. A usually wrong result is not.)

You might be excused for assuming that the problem is related to some changes in the DMOZ server. (Not that that's a particularly useful or reliable assumption.) But to go from there to the assumption that those changes were the problem is to take a step not at all warranted by the nature of interface protocols. It's always a mistake not to code to the standards, regardless of how big a mistake the idiot at the other end of the pipe is making. (And in this context the IE is one of the biggest mistakes ever made -- lots more expensive than, say, a space shuttle crash or oil supertanker wreck.)

Thanks for your advice. I've taken your advice and tried again just now and things are getting better.... in that the error message this time is at least one that means I know it has got through to Open. Am now getting the "Sorry, we could not determine your IP address for this submission. This may be because your browser or ISP has cached the previous page. Your submission has been redirected to the misplacd submissions folder. We apologise for the inconvenience.
Please go back in your browser and resubmit the form." message.
Having already cleared the cache in Netscape locally just before I did the submission, I guess it is time to wait for the ISP to do their bit and more importantly sit tight and wait for the kind guys who deal with the misplaced submissions at your end as previous postings in this topic explain.

Thanks for the help.

Kari

Hi. I've just tried submitting a site and here is some feedback for you, hope it helps...

Error message: "Sorry, we could not determine your IP address for this submission. This may be because your browser or ISP has cached the previous page. Your submission has been redirected to the misplacd submissions folder. We apologise for the inconvenience.
Please go back in your browser and resubmit the form."

The cgi script which catches the IP address of the submitter is trying to determine the local users IP address - fair enough. If the submitters ISP operates a caching system (as most now do), this will fail _every time_

In order to combat this, your engineers might like to take a look at the piece of script that captures the IP address and change it to something like;
<pre><font class="small">code:</font><hr>
if (getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR')){
$ip=getenv('HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR');
}
else {
$ip=getenv('REMOTE_ADDR');
} </pre><hr>

This will catch the real IP, and fallback to the cache IP...and should hopefully solve the problem <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

FYI, I tried submitting using IE6, Moz0.9, Opera, NS4.7 on both my ISP transparent cache, and two other caches (Edinburgh, Scotland and Croydon, England) - none of them worked. With my particular ISP it is impossible not to go through one of their caches... <img src="/images/icons/frown.gif" alt="" />

So, I then telnetted into my own server and lynx'd the dmoz add script which added my site perfectly (obviously I was bypassing my ISP cache.

But anyway, that code above is PHP, and the syntax is similar to the scripts you use I should imagine. I hope it helps, or at least gives some pointers...

Can I have my site looked at quicker that I just added in return <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" /> LOLs <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Thanks a lot for catching that burt! <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

We'll be sure to pass it on.

kari, that last was not a failure message...the submittal did get in, although in an auxiliary queue, The editalls are trying very hard to move those sites to the main unreviewed queues in a timely fashion (I've got another browser window open there right now.)

Thanks for all your help. Much appreciated.

Kari

Unfortunately the HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR suggestion given by burt won't solve the problem. The error message is shown when both X_FORWARDED_FOR and REMOTE_ADDR are not set. Another problem is that a lot of the time we would see X_FORWARDED_FOR set to 10.x.x.x. Since that's the standard IP for an internal network, it's not a lot of use for record keeping as it could refer to any one of millions of machines around the world.

When I received the error message, both IP's were gettable by any script (both my "real" IP and the "cached" IP address). I tried in a variety of browsers - therefore the script is not working perfectly.

It's obvious that the problem is one to do with ISPs using caches, but to simply out and say that the problem is with the way that ISPs have changed their working practices in akin to burying your head in the sand.

If they have changed, then surely Dmoz should change too to reflect this. As for record-keeping - I do not know exactly how you guys work internally, but surely it is better to get the page submitted without an IP than it is to refuse pages because the IP cannot be collected?

I wonder if any 'Engineers' have even looked at the CGI script that powers submissions.

Ooops, part of that message refers to dfy's message here: http://www.resource-zone.com/showflat.php?Cat=&amp;Board=submissions&amp;Number=12690&amp;page=0&amp;view=collapsed&amp;sb=5&amp;o=21&amp;fpart=1#Post12772

The details in my post above came from the engineer that was looking for ways to reduce the amount of people enquiring/complaining about getting that error. Sorry, I should have made that clear beforehand. There has been much work in that area recently and we are convinced that this is the right way forward for the directory.