Category placement doesnt make sense.

Short version:

I recently posted a "Submission Status" to the submission status board for the following web site I submitted to be listed in dmoz:

NailSalonDirectory - A comprehensive listing of nail salons nationwide. Easily find a nail salon near you.

I posted the listing request to this category:

http://dmoz.org/Health/Beauty/Salons_and_Spas/

In this same category are the following other sites (dmoz description included) which are very similar to mine:

Nail Salons Online - Directory of nail and beauty Salons. Includes other resources and links.

About Spas - Directory of US and global spas. Includes brief descriptions and links to their web sites.

Beautysalons.com - Directory of hair salons in the United States.

Finest Health Spas - A directory of spas worldwide. Includes featured and reviewed spas

Salonlistings.com - Hair salon locator.

SalonSearch.com - New Jersey directory of salons, spas, and barber shops.


One of the admins said that my URL was being moved to a different category for listing then I requested, specifically it is being moved to "http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Resources/Directories". The description of this category says "Please submit only sites for business directories which span multiple industries and multiple continents."

My site does not fit this category because it DOES NOT span multiple industries as the description requires. It only covers one industry, nail salons. My site DOES fit in nicely with the other sites I listed above in the original category I requested.

Can someone please shed some light on why my site is not being put in the original category I requested in which it seems to fit perfectly and into a category that the dmoz description itself says it does not belong?

Here is a link to my "Submission Status" request in case it helps.
http://resource-zone.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12575

Thank you for your time.

Regards,

David

No, I don't see any point to discussing it now.

If the site happens to be reviewed and listed in the other category, then you can enter an "Update URL" to suggest a category change: and we can discuss the status of that. Right now, the site hasn't been listed anywhere: and not being listed in one category has much the same effect as not being listed in any other category.

Forgive me

Please forgive me. Due to the nature of the directory things take a long time to get done, anywhere from 2 hours to 2 years as I am reminded from time to time so I thought I would addresses this potential problem as soon as possible as to minimize the work done on everyones end.

I need to think of this more like a government agency were things just need to run their course without interference no matter how silly they may seem at the time.

I will take your advice and address the problem once it occurs and no longer try to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

I am sure there are many times you may wish we can see things from your side, and I am not insensitive to that, however sometimes I wish you could see it from ours.

In any event thank you and I will continue to wait patiently. I have a lot of respect for the time and effort put in to make DMOZ a useful directory.

Regards,

Dave

In a sense, that's right. Editors have the same responsibility to submitters as bureaucrats have to supplicants -- none. They answer to their own boss (which is their own concept of their mission). Talking to submitters isn't in a line item anywhere on the performance review!

Editors, like bureaucrats, can feel sympathy or irritation with submitters, but their duty lies in another direction altogether.

Inside the community, editors see ourselves as volunteers, without a boss, with a vision of a customer to whom we will almost never speak directly. And webmasters are content providers -- we are their customers, and they can provide what we like or we'll go elsewhere. The ones that try to talk with us are like used car salesmen, or worse: pests trying to interfere with our work and harm everybody just to gain an undeserved advantage for themselves.

And both perceptions are partly a matter of perspective and partly a matter of prejudice: albeit prejudice reinforced by abundant anecdotage. There's nothing we can do about the perspective, except to remind people that there are other perspectives (and when you become an editor, you have to accept that you will be despised and vilified by people, sometimes because they are pure evil, and sometimes simply because they are frustrated by [what you know are necessarily] unreasonable expectations.

Yes, and when you're a submitter, editors will sometimes blow you off because (all unseen to you) they're working on another collections of websites, and they know (based on The Way Things Are Done) the editor who makes the decision won't ever see the communication you're so insistently providing.

I need to think of this more like a government agency

Click to expand...

If ODP becomes like this, I'm gone

No, bobrat, it really does look like that from the wrong side of the outside.

It doesn't look like that from a user perspective -- it is from the perspective of vendors thinking that they are users, and requesting rather than offering services (which is the way they would approach all other major directories and most minor ones).

I agree, it _isn't_ like that from the inside, but don't confuse ontology with sociology; and don't confuse functionality with interface.