Automatic Editor-Level Features

Dear all,

I cannot find any information about contributing ODP as a developer, rather than as an editor. I have a few ideas in mind and I can help implement them (or other ideas):

1. An automatic first level prioritizing filter that will sort submissions based on various factors (for example, sites that pop up windows, redirects to another domain, contain nothing but advertisements, contain viruses, or too exposed to XSS injections will have a lower priority).

2. An automatic first level rejection filter for Kids & Teens, based on the usage of improper words, links to improper websites, etc...

3. A 'current status' & 'reason of rejection' information pages for submitted sites (I noticed that many of the posts all around the forums deal with those two).

About the last one, I have noticed that editors do not specify as for the reason of a certain rejection, and I assume that this is due to small debates would grow right after.
However, if each rejection was properly explained in a read-only and non-negotiable page, it would have helped create a better Internet, and lead to less false-submissions.

4. I came across some websites on ODP that are not working well and some that were even removed. I assume they weren't approved this way, and I thought of additional feature that will iterate through all approved sites once a month, and will mark sites that seem to require editors' attention (due to a major change in content, or the sudden occurrence of what the first feature would reject).

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All in all, this project is great.
Those features I mentioned above will allow editors to less deal with the overhead of 95% improper sites, users' submission-status / reason-of-rejection questions, etc...

Best Regards,
Moshe.

AOL is currently working on a new software structure. One of the things we hope will come out of this will be editor-level APIs where some of the things you've described can be implemented. At the moment we don't have details sufficient to start coding.

Development of DMOZ is not done by editors but by the owner of DMOZ, which is AOL.
1. All websites have the same priority for us, but individual editors might use their own way of prioritising suggested websites. Some of your examples are almost impossible to detect for a program.
2. Websites are not rejected for such reasons. They are moved to classic (non K&T) categories.
3. This has been discussed often and conclusion is that we can not see any real benefit for DMOZ or the editors. I won´t say that it will never happen but there are many more improvements and only very limited developement capacity.
4. This is already done. But not all situations are noticed by our quality control programs. That is were humans come in. Editor and non-Editor.

I cannot find any information about contributing ODP as a developer

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We are owned by AOL and only they have access to the main codebase. There are no opportunities for outsiders to add to it or amend it.

A few technically skilled editors have permissions to access the raw data (but not the codebase) and are able to produce useful editorial tools - some of which are hosted on AOL's servers and some not.

Most of your improvements have been suggested previously, but they seem to focus on providing a services or information to website owners. Our objective is to build and maintain a directory of use to surfers and downstream database users. That's not at all the same thing as providing a service to website owners .

Your thoughts on prioritisation are interesting except that we don't have any priorities. The pool of listing suggestions in a category is just that - a pool, not a FIFO. Indeed, in many categories, editors find it more efficient to seek out websites for themselves rather than wade through the morass of suggestions.

You might have misunderstood our objectives and how we operate here. ODP is a volunteer organisation building a directory as a hobby. Editors edit where they wish, when they wish and as much as they wish within the constraints of their permissions. We have no schedules or systems to force people to do work that they don't volunteer to do. ODP is not primarily a free listing service for website owners and it does not attempt to process their listing suggestions within the time scales desired by them.

1. I can think of a reasonable solution for each of the examples I mentioned above (up to a certain level, of course).
3. First, if DMOZ is about making the Internet a better place, then it serves this exact goal.
Second, editors do seem to have a lot of overhead with those stuff around the forums anyway.

Oh, ummm... you have a point there
I did see it from the website owners POV
I just thought that editors have a FIFO and in such a case, those features would have helped both sides

When I first heard of ODP it was long before I started my own website, and I was told that it serves as a quality status for websites, in order to raise the standards of websites in general.
With that in mind, about the "information to website owners"... as I said earlier, I do believe that if this information is descriptive enough, it will result in improvement of the website in question and that, in turn, will lead to higher standards in general. ODP seems to have a great influence on websites all around the Internet, so addressing websites owners does not necessarily miss those objectives. The current situation is that websites that were rejected are not always aware of the reason, thus, leave problems as they are.

In any case, I cannot become an editor (I own a site myself, and in any case, I would have rejected most sites on the Internet ),
but I can help as a developer quite a lot (especially when it comes to automatic analysis of non-structural data).
Oh well...

BMoshe said:

In any case, I cannot become an editor (I own a site myself, and in any case, I would have rejected most sites on the Internet ),

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Owning a website is no problem. Many editors do. Just do not give it any special treatment.

but I can help as a developer quite a lot (especially when it comes to automatic analysis of non-structural data).

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Than you will have to become an AOL employee.

Just to tidy up one small point. When an editor declines to list a website, he has to log a reason. It's just that the reason isn't publicly available. If you're worried as to whether or not a website is listable, you can self check against the guidelines that editors use.

Oh no, I really do believe that informing the user of the rejection reasons will lead to better development of that website.
As far as Lushee concerns, I did my best to cover the criteria. I hope it is sufficient

In any case, I applied to become an editor for games sites for children in Hebrew.

When this forum was first started, we also believed that informing the owner/webmaster would be helpful. We gave status updates here and told those who asked here exactly why the site was not listable. We learned through experience that it didn't help. If they owned a drop-ship site, they didn't want to hear that we didn't list that type of site, and understandably didn't want to change their business model. I can think of one site where it did help. It was an employment search site which depended upon the search of their database, and the search wasn't working. I wrote to the webmaster as a regular user, not as an ODP editor and told him that search wasn't working. Checked the site several more times, and after a couple of months, search still didn't work. After he came here and was told that search wasn't working, he fixed it. But if he had paid attention to email from a regular user, the site would have been listed months earlier.

And telling spammers why their sites aren't listable isn't helpful either. They already know that their sites don't meet our Guidelines.

Good luck with your application.

I really do believe that informing the user of the rejection reasons will lead to better development of that website.

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It's not a matter of faith to many of use. We have knowledge based on experience.

But look at it this way, from an honest webmaster point of view. Mr. H. W. M. has something unique: knowledge or perspective or skills possessed by nobody else on earth.