Crossmap.com Directory Question

Hi There

I work for one of the largest Christian portals on the internet, Crossmap.com. We were listed for the past 2 years in this directory:

http://dmoz.org/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Christianity/Directories/

Recently, our site was removed. After contacting one of the directory editors, we learned that our Christian directory was out of compliance with dmoz licensing guidelines. Our directory is here:

http://dir.crossmap.com

The editor said that in order to have our site reinstated, we must either give proper attribution or remove our directories. We have been using our own directories independently from Dmoz for about 2 years. This means that while many areas are similar, many of the categories have been altered from the original Dmoz direcotry strucutre. As such, it is difficult to make the attribution exactly as specified earlier.

The editor I contacted suggested I post here. We would love to give proper credit for the Dmoz build we used from 2 years back (we simply did not read the licensing agreement deeply enough, sorry about that). However, we will need a suggestion for a proper way to do that. We would be willing to put one of the dmoz brand logos on the directory front page - would that be sufficient?

Anyways, we have worked for almost 5 years now to provide one of the most comprehensive resources for Christians on the internet. We would really like to be included in the Dmoz directories again so we can reach out to as many Christians as possible.

thanks much

Roy Li
Crossmap.com

IMO, the problem you have is something that the licence agreement doesn't fully deal with. I would have thought that a good faith attempt to satisfy the spirit of the requirements will be good enough...

Any pages with ODP data on them will need the attribution (and IIRC a statement that you've modified the data). Categories which have direct equivalents in the ODP directory should obviously have the 'submit a site' and 'become an editor' links pointing there.

For categories with no direct equivalent, I think it would be best to link to the 'most suitable' current ODP category. 'Most suitable' should probably be determined by where the ODP data on that page originally came from (or where the sites there would be / are listed in the ODP). If you have a single page which contains sites from several ODP categories which are subcategories of a more general ODP category, then linking to the more general category might be the best thing to do.

Note that this is only the thoughts of a volunteer editor, and shouldn't be taken as official ODP policy...

Hi There

Thank you for your honest opinions.

I believe it would be impossibly difficult to determine which sections correspond with which Dmoz sections, but I would be willing to put the general banner on the bottom of each page linking to the Dmoz front page. The banner I am looking at is here:

http://dmoz.org/become_an_editor/

Is this sufficient? Is there a member of staff who can give advice?

thanks

Roy
Crossmap.com

For users who maintain exact copies of our categories, we are quite strict about the 'submit a site' and 'become an editor' links going to the right place. I would have though that as a miniumum you will have to put the banner on each page which contains any of our data and ensure that the links work correctly for each category which has an direct ODP equivalent. Looking around, I can see quite a lot of the latter.

As an aside, you may be misunderstanding the licence agreement slightly. It's not just something data users need to do to be listed in the ODP, it is a legal requirement that everyone using ODP data must comply with.

Of the 15,000 directories we have in our directory, perhaps half of them have no equivalent to the ODP. I currently have a minimal staff that updates the directory, and simply lack the manpower to find out which pages are duplicates of the ODP.

I did not do this with mal-intention (or I would not be posting in the DMOZ forums), but this is the situation that I am in now after midunderstanding the license several years ago. I would like to comply as much as possible, and have suggested what I can do.

I am offering to do the best I can. If you have suggestions, I am all ears.

Roy