Criticism of ODP & Implementation of Policy

I have briefly questioned the listing policy and its implementation before, but have recently added an ODP criticism page http://www.lawrencechard.com/odpopendirectoryprojectdmoz.html to my own personal site. The page itself is incomplete as yet, as is the rest of the site.
It's a more permanent record than posting here, and I can add to it and modify as required.
Fair comment or what?

If this page is incomplete, you should not submit it to ODP, since we don't accept sites under construction. When complete you might submit it to http://www.dmoz.org/Home/Consumer_I.../Internet/Directories/Open_Directory_Project/ although we normally don't list deep links.

And we don't do site reviews in this forum, that's up to the reviewing editor.

Criticism of ODP Page Incomplete

I was not submitting the site or page for inclusion in ODP, just providing it as a link to a longish comment intended as an extended Forum entry.
I mentioned it was incomplete partly so that nobody would try to review it, and also because I noticed at least two omissions which I didn't have time to add at 2 a.m.
The "fair comment" remark was intended to sound out opinion about the content of the page. I will be happy to insert responses into the page.

This is not the purpose of this forum. We are here to assist people who have questions about how to use the directory, not to answer questions about how the directory operates. Take a look at our Posting Guidelines. When your page is finished, you are welcome to suggest the URL to the ODP and it will be reviewed per our Guidelines. Thanks.

I thought it was a reasonably cogent, well presented expression of what a lot of submitters express in these forums and elsewhere. It also reveals the author's personal interest in the question more candidly than such criticisms usually do. I think that it's worth the read.

(This should not be taken as an endorsement of the ideas expressed, because I don't agree with them. I just think it's worth the read.)

Great Read! Especially the part of "Unique Content & Specialisation".

We've been trying to make ODP understand that our duplicate content/services was merely a partnership we had recently established;
Being a home based office; we spent a few weeks at their office when working on large projects; we directed our calls their; and then POOF !! both our sites were gone. Yes we do offer some of the same services. Yes we do work from the same location; however money generated goes from both sites goes into different pockets at the end the day!

I got fried, toasted and servered by almost every Editor when I attempted to explain the situation.In any case, we asked in our post "advise" what can be done to rectify the situation and was told we were banned forever.

Even when I company is willing to rectify any problem that caused the mis-understanding - I'm very suprised that ODP cannot consider a company's genuine williness to make a right from wrong.

"POOF!!" ????

That implies that it happened suddenly and without warning when, in fact, there are several threads on this very forum documenting the whole affair.

You may think it right or wrong, and that's the subject of another thread, but "POOF"?

fashezee, you contradict yourself almost every time you write. Even in the post you just wrote here.

Your particular situation has been more than adequately discussed both here in this forum and in other forums. Please do stop bringing it up (and definitely stop hijacking someone else's thread to do so when you have at least one of your own already in play).

He didn't take the test

I guess lawrence is a new ODP editor!

Hijack - No. merely confirming some points Lawrence has in his article.

Contradict - Yes. I do realize certain previous threads of mine were contracticting, certain parts of the timeline were leftout for simplicity sake which resulted in a tangeled story; but we are definitely not spammers;

We like to work with DMOZ and not spam them as we do develop/design quality, content rich websites for a living.

No, I meant that you regularly contradict yourself within a single post, not that your threads contradict one another (though there is that as well).

And by hijacking I mean where you comment on something someone else posts and yet still manage to start up a new complaint about your specific situation at the same time. Comment as you will about Lawrence Chard's post but please leave discussion of your specific situation out of it.

I'll proffer a completely personal and unofficial comment, then, speaking as no one but myself:

I think the majority of webmasters are probably relieved and/or happy about the one-business-one-listing ideal at the ODP; if not, they probably should be. If we didn't have such a policy, then A) a webmaster would have to waste time partitioning and submitting as many pieces of his website as possible in order to keep up with the competition, even if it was less user-friendly; B) small businesses with smallish sites would be completely buried by huge businesses with huge sites; C) editors would have many times more sites to review and you'd have to wait longer than you already do; and D) you'd face the daunting prospect of one of your competitors having 25 listings out there before your 25 even come up for review--one ODP link isn't a big deal in my opinion, but if one site got 25 of them and another had 0, that would just be bound to have an effect.

It's like the way people always daydream about living in the Middle Ages. Everyone daydreams about being the princess, but 99% of the time they would really be a serf. (-: If we let everyone have multiple sites, you MIGHT be the one with a nice empire of a dozen sites while your competitors look on jealously from across the moat... but you'd more likely be one of the ones on the other side of the moat. Especially in industries like, say, bookselling, where there's a 900-pound-gorilla in the castle. All told, one listing per business is just simpler and fairer for everyone, in my opinion.

Lets work together instead of against and stop this ODP vs. Webmaster issue.

Certain sites are being rejected, refused entry by the leading directory online. Being part of a professional web team, we want to ensure that we:
- avoid
- fix
- prevent
this from happening to our sites and our client's websites. ODP has done a great job given the fact it's based on volunteers, however the is still wholes that need to be patched, the kind of wholes that are hard to see when your inside ODP. I believe a collective effort between Editors and Webmasters is needed.

There is a wonderful partnership in place.

Webmasters who develop sites with lots of unique content are offered the opportunity for a free listing. They don't even have to submit their sites.

Webmasters who spam, webmasters who misrepresent, webmasters who violate our rules and invited to go play elsewhere.

Heck, we even let the webmasters who don't play well with others come into our forum and complain. Now what could be fairer than that?

Actually, webmasters can fix that all by themselves. Link prominently from each of the divisions of your business to the others. Then our users will be able to find not only your main site, but all of the others.

Lawrence_Chard seems to have done a good job of this already. Which leaves only the philosophical question of whether our directory and our users would be better off if each substantial division of his business, all his competitors' businesses, and every other business listed in the ODP had five or six listings apiece, or just the one. He's given his opinion on this matter already; I've given mine. I don't think the ODP is likely to change its policy on this, but if one of you would like to do up a niche directory which multiply listed businesses in appropriate ways, I can see how that could be valuable to some users, and would encourage you to go ahead.

Deceptive mirrors of the same content have a whole other set of issues in addition to the ones LC brings up, naturally.

All of this imho, not speaking for anyone other than myself, and so forth.

fashezee, please drop the issue of your two sites. You've been given a ton of responses to your various threads about them and you've long since leap into the realm of violating our TOS by arguing about the information you've been given. No more.

This is just rehashing old issues and serves no purpose. I'm closing this thread.