Comment on submission process

I think that ODP would be a lot less frustrating if when you submitted your site, you at least got an email acknowledging your submission. Even better would be if you could check on the status of URL. As it is, its kind of a black box. I submitted http://www.marketocracy.com

a while back. Not long enough to complain yet, because at this point, it hasn't been that long (3 weeks), which is nothing as I understand it for ODP.

But it would be a lot easier to wait if I could be sure that my url was even in the queue.

Looking over this site, I think that frustration is common. I suggest that one of the volunteers here look into perhaps writing some status query tool that could automate most of this forum out of existence.

It wouldn't have to do a lot frankly. First draft of just "yes, your URL is in the queue" would make me and about 90% of the people in this forum happy.

Pierce

Hi, thanks for your comments. These issues have been debated here and discussed extensively in the internal forums recently. The conclusions were as follows:

1) When you submit your site, there is a confirmation screen that you are redirected to, saying that your site has been submitted successfully. If you reach this screen then that is sufficient to confirm that the submission has been accepted.

2) The reason why there is no automated way to check the status of a submission, and similarly why you don't receive an e-mail when your site is processed (moved, listed or deleted), is because this would make it easier for spammers to target the ODP. If we reject spam-the-ODP.com and tell them about it then the next day we'll be guaranteed to receive e-spam-the-ODP.com and spam-the-ODP-123.com the next day.

Useful suggestions and perhaps in a less spam-prone world they might have been implemented. As it is, this forum is the best we can provide.

I should point out that once your site has been submitted to the single most appropriate ODP category, the best thing you can do is concentrate on improving your site design and content, get incoming links from other sources etc. and forget about the ODP - one day you'll hopefully be pleasantly surprised that you've been listed. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Well, it seems to me like you're already getting spammed by everyone, not just the black hats! <img src="/images/icons/ooo.gif" alt="" />

Suggestions:

Make clear on the submission acknowledgement screen that site submission can take up to a month or more. If you had done that, I wouldn't have done a double submit, because I would have known better.

Ask for a nominal ($10) donation to charity for each submission status check. (i.e. the Red Cross, United Way, etc. ) That would cut down on spam, while doing some social good.

Have the status screen return one of those un "OCR-able" images.

Have a "reject with cloak" status for people who spam. Then it wouldn't update their status.

Finally, if it takes a month to get listed anyways, I wouldn't worry too much about SPAM.


Pierce

P.S.

I should say that I'm not worried particularly about being listed. Marketocracy has been in several best of the web listings, we're pretty well known in the financial world, and we have a pretty popular site. (I think we're number #32000 on Alexa). We even have a two free Yahoo listings (didn't even ask them for one). So its just a matter of time before we get into the ODP. I just wish the process had been less opaque.

&gt;Well, it seems to me like you're already getting spammed by everyone, not just the black hats!

We prefer not to put it that way. But even so, the guys wearing black (and beyond, deep into octarine) hats account for a significant part of the problem in two ways:

1) "Honest but ill-informed" spammers submit the same URL over and over again, and our automated processes catch many of them.

2) The B.-or-O.-Hatters are "adaptive" spammers. We're not talking about a large percentage of the population here -- certainly less than 0.1%. But these people are (at best) borderline insane -- probably incapable of operating within normal society, certainly incapable of dealing with challenges to their solipsistic worldview except with paranoic conspiracy theories. (And therefore they gravitate to the net where their psychopathic tendancies aren't so immediately obvious.) They are also (at best) very stupid -- they'll keep doing the same easily caught spam, until they figure out we're on to them. But, within the limits of their ethics (which isn't much of a constraint) and their intelligence (which is), they are "adaptive spammers" -- that is, they change whatever it is about their techniques that seems to them to signal "spam." And that occasionally makes it harder for us to detect the new spam. We can't string these jerks up like they deserve, but the further we can string them along, the more information we get about their patterns of abuse -- the more their limited well of imagination is exhausted futilely before they hit on something that slows our investigations down again.

I should add, some of the ideas you mention have been discussed. When the server upgrades are over, the editors will have a long list of priorities for the editing software, and several of them will probably appear "somewhere" on the list.

But remember that the editors aren't persuaded a substantial amount of spam is being caused by the kind of ignorance that would be addressed by a "submission status report."

Malicious spam and pure stupid spam (like the idiots who fall for the "pay me $29.99 a month to submit your site monthly to 5000 search engines" scams, or the greedy fools who buy the "submit every page of your site automatically to the ODP" software) (and, of course, malicious stupid spam) constitute the vast majority of the dis-solicited submittals.

Well, adding the "submissions can take over a month to appear, please don't resubmit your site" text to the result page would take minimal development time... <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

You know, that is a very good idea and I can assure you that it will get passed along to the developers and the folks who decide that kind of stuff. Fine tuning our communication is always a good thing and I want to thank you for the good thoughts you have put into the process.

You're welcome. Like I said, I'm not overly worried about getting listed or not, so its easy for me to see the "big picture".