Banned somehow? Akira Web not getting in DMOZ

Wrong assumption from reading this forum. Correct assumption would have been:

"Is seems like most of the people asking for submission status in this forum have to wait 3-12 months".

You may have forgotten that people who do not have to wait (or only a few days) would never request a status report in here. So you will never get in touch with them

Using the current informationa and tools available to editors, it would be totally impossible to estimate the average wait. And if we were able to gather enough data to do this, any estimate would be misleading. There are portions of the directory where the average wait could well be months, and other portions where the average is less than a week.

Ok, so tell me what most likely waiting period is for submitters? Yes I know it varies from editor to editor, category to category etc. I have read from another editor here, that 6 months to 1 year is not uncommon, hence my 3 to 12 months EXAMPLE.


RE:...submission status in this forum have to wait 3-12 months

Ok, your words not mine. As this forum is a pretty well kept secret, do you think this figure would rise or fall when/if all sumitters are made aware of it? The fact that you do not let all submitters (if any) know about this forum (via the confirmation page etc) sais to me that the average wait IS as bad (if not worse) at it seems.

Dave

Taking "most likely" as a loose and imprecise way of saying "median", I imagine it would be technically possible to calculate the number you think you're looking for, or any of the other numbers that are often called "averages". But it would be a lot of effort for no gain at all.

The reason it would be no gain at all is that the variance involved, several orders of magnitude, is so great that no number we could derive would have any predictive value whatsoever. Having the number in hand, you would still have no idea whether to expect a few hours or many months.

Or, putting the above more succinctly ...

What theseeker said.

Stop thinking of gain for editors, but rather informing submitters of the time lag. It's such a little thing to do in return for submitters making the directory a better place, it's not their fault there are not enough editors. I would go with a figure just above what a guestimate would be, i.e 3 month to 1 year, BEFORE checking on status.

Well informed submitters are happy submitters. It's little wonder so many Webmasters, submitters etc get so annoyed and frustated.

I simply cannot see how you can take full pride in a directory that is, and beyond, 12 months behind in many areas. One core reason people use the WWW to is to get the latest and greatest info. If they want outdated info they will go to the libary and browse through last years PC mag.

Whether DMOZ likes to admit it or not, a Web directory that is stale and behind the times can never become #1 With the way Editors and DOMZ currently treat (or rather ignore) most sumitters, editors will end up having to find all the sites themselves. This would mean an even less up-to-date directory.

DMOZ is not as good as it use to be by a long shot.

Dave

I believe the editors above were saying that quoting an average would not help submitters.

Supposing we say "expect a wait of at least three months". Then site developers feel that they have a prediction on which they can safely act. They may submit a site as soon as they have a domain, thinking that they have three months to create the site. But supposing that particular category has no backlog and a very active editor? The submission could be reviewed and deleted as a non-existent site within 24 hours. So isn't it better to stress the huge range in reviewing times?

It is highly likely that most categories that haven't been updated for a year are not those with 'latest and greatest info' available to list. Perhaps a category about a film that came out in 1980 - not much new information being published on the web about it, not much interest in it, therefore category doesn't get edited much.

Topical subjects, like SARS, the Columbia shuttle crash, the Iraq war etc. get built very rapidly and maintained assiduously precisely because there is up-to-date information being published. However, most of these categories are not built through webmaster submissions. The ODP had a comprehensive SARS category some weeks before the Google index updated to include all the new information sites.

Being up to date isn't necessarily the same as listing all the unreviewed sites.

They may submit a site as soon as they have a domain, thinking that they have three months

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Very good point. I'm routinely doing that, someone submits a page, roughly filled in, with lots of links to "coming soon", probably assuming it will take a few weeks to get reviewed, and they want to get a place in the hypothetical "queue" line. I come along the same day, look at it, tag it as "under construction", come back a few days later to give them a second chance, look again, find it's still not finished, and delete it.

quoting an average would not help submitters.

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I've figured out the formula for an average. Based on the fact that I don't think a site could get accepted in less than five minutes, and that some sites will never get accepted, we have a range of 5 minutes to infinity. So the average is [infinity-5]/2. I'm not sure if that helps.

Ah, now we're getting into the branch of surreal mathematics. Which is larger, infinity, (infinity-5)/2, infinity^2, infinity^infinity or the length of the unreviewed queue in the dmoz category http://dmoz.org/Submissions/Travel,_Pharmacy_and_Gambling/Affiliates ?

DaveHawley,

It's little wonder so many Webmasters, submitters etc get so annoyed and frustated.

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I understand what you're saying, but comments like the above don't really support your argument. There are almost 4 million sites listed in the directory, so if they were all annoyed with us we would be pretty busy here answering questions Besides the relatively few people in the various forums who have issues with their web sites not getting listed, where are all of these frustrated web masters who you speak of?

There is no conspiracy about why resource-zone.com is not mentioned in ODP submission confirmation pages. As stated in the guidelines here, this forum is not an official branch of the Open Directory Project. We're just a bunch of editors who wanted to help get some info out to the public. This site hasn't actually been up and running that long. If we decide that this forum is serving a useful purpose we will probably start mentioning it in ODP documents. There has been a lot going on with the ODP upgrades, and changing text on hard coded pages is probably low on the list of priorities. Don't forget that we really do have limited resources (One overworked tech person).

Enhancing the way that the ODP works is an ongoing process. Since the start of the Project we have changed the way things are done. We will continue to make changes to the way things are done. As I've mentioned before, ideas from outside of the system do not fall on deaf ears, they just don't often get implemented overnight

This thread seems to be getting a bit long and off topic. Can we close this one off now? Has the original question been answered?

OK, we've been discussing whether or not telling users the "average" time to review. And someone pops in with:

>"Ok, so tell me what most likely waiting period is for submitters?"

It doesn't matter who said it, LOTS of people make that same leap: from "average" to "most likely." Now for a Poisson distribution, that is sort of valid. But each category acts as a separate Poisson distribution, and that assumption is NOT valid for the sum of 400,000 separate Bell curves! I haven't done the math, but I'm strongly suspecting that at any particular instant, new submittals are statistically more likely to be being reviewed -- and the longer a site HAS waited, the more likely it is to have to wait even longer than the average newly submitted site.

Which is another way of saying, "We mustn't TELL people "average waiting time" because there is no way on earth that we can avoid them HEARING us say "most likely waiting time" when we say "average".

I will mention again that "out of date" is not an expression that has any significance whatsoever with regard to site submission date: it is only site creation date.... So comparing "submission date" with "review date" gives no information whatsoever about the currency of the directory.

Can we close this one off now?

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Yes, please.

Can we close this one off now?

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I think the subject has been well explored. I've bookmarked this thread if anyone needs to find it later.