DMOZ is Dead...Long Live the Open Directory Movement!

Non-editors need to remember that many of the guidelines were written years ago. Some have been updated, some are being updated (when things are working), and others need to be updated.
Discussion about this, and carrying it out, are just two of the important directory maintenance tasks performed by volunteers as they have time and inclination. And yet so many webmasters continue to assume (ie wish) that reviewing site suggestions is the only thing editors do.

Why is it that all of us editors are saying the very same things in different ways, and yet the message still isn't getting through? Is there a problem with the forum?

Is it being mistranslated into another language?

Is there a problem with the forum?

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No fault with transmission, just with the receivers.

I just joined this forum 10 minutes back. And the content of this thread and the number of replies and the tones have baffled me. I joined here to get some tips on adding my site to the directory. But with all these talk about DMOZ dying... I really hope everything will be fine soon.

Hello forse and welcome to Resource Zone.

It is not the editors who are talking about ODP dying, but we are waiting patiently for things to be fixed. Fortunately there is a great sense of community within the ODP, and we are all still able to keep in touch through the internal forums and work on other ODP-related projects while the technical staff work hard on the repairs to the editing server. So no, it is very far from dying!

If your questions are not answered by the official guidelines or the forum FAQ, by all means ask, and we will be happy to help you.

Sometimes editors get tired of answering the same questions over and over again, when people could just as easily read the FAQ and other answers, so I hope you will forgive some of the impatient replies.

Skeletje, regardless of whatever it does or does not say on the application forms and other documentation, there is an automatic timeout for any editor who is inactive for four months (I think the cut-off is actually 120 days). If you do not make a qualifying edit within that period from your last edit, then your account is automatically deactivated by the system. This applies to everyone (except a few listed with 'root permissions at http://dmoz.org/edoc/editall.html which are ther admins and AOL staff) and there is no manual intervention or review based on permission-level. People whose accounts have timed out are of course able to apply for re-instatement. Cases are judged my meta edtors according to the guidelines at http://dmoz.org/guidelines/meta/reinstatements.html

On top of the four-month timeout there is a similar requirement for brand new editors to log in and make an edit within the first month of their editorship. Once they do so, they revert to the four month period like everyone else.

I'm not sure of the exact reasoning behind these cut-offs, and why those particular times-spans were chosen, but they do seem to make sense to me. Although editors don't in any way block other editors from edtiing in the same places, those with higher permissions pften like to keep an eye on those who are newer and less experienced. This takes time, and it's not a good investment to be checking up on people are aren't contributing much. Also editing standards and guidelines change over time. If you're not regurlarly involved you may miss important changes. Allowing such people to continue to edit is more likely to lead to mistakes being made.

I just joined this forum 10 minutes back. And the content of this thread and the number of replies and the tones have baffled me. I joined here to get some tips on adding my site to the directory. But with all these talk about DMOZ dying... I really hope everything will be fine soon.

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I'm sorry, forse. It just gets a little bewildering sometimes when multiple editors try to tell someone the grass is green, in multiple ways, and they still believe it's red, .

Did you find what you were looking for, or do you need further assistance?

pvgool said:

... DMOZ is not a tool for website promotion.

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This is the point that so many folks cannot grasp, refuse to accept or simply deny. This is the point so many more would love to change.

You cannot bend the ODP into what you want it to be. It is what it is. Period.

Hi!

I am an internet developer myself, I really can't understand that it takes you so long to restore the server!

There must be 100's of super programmers available and willing to help you and then there is Google Inc. who is one of your biggest fans who will also be verry willing to help recover the ODP for free.

I am willing to help also, you can contact me on <email removed>

Best Regards,
Jan Jaap Hakvoort

Original suggestion:

Charge 20$ to review a site, hire a decent programmer, get your system together, hire some reviewers and all these useless debates will go away and if you do it right you will get your directory back on track.

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Response from Meta:

Finally, your suggestion that ODP becomes a paid listing service is so completely at odds with its social contract that I can only assume you have not read that far.

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I think makrhod did not understand the original suggestion correctly.
The suggestion was not that DMOZ should accept payments for listing,
but accept payments for reviewing sites. DMOZ can still reject the
site suggested, and keep the $20 [or whatever was the fee].

Overall the response seemed to be quite personal and defensive.
The suggestions made in this forum are only to improve what the
readers of the forum perceive to be an inefficient process, that cannot
be solved by asking more people to volunteer as editors.
People can contribute ideas too, as well as contributing time as editors.

The underlying problem, other that the site being down for over a month,
is that the approach of increasing the number of volunteer
editors is inherently not scalable [cannot keep up with the number of good quality sites being created every day]. It is not a rejection of the open directory approach to admit this.

The original suggestor's idea is to pay for more reviewers by charging fees
to review site suggestions. This would be a bit of an improvement, but then someone would have to manage all those hired reviewers, etc. It might become like a non-profit Encyclopedia Brittanica or something.
It would still not address the scalabililty problem.

Overall my feeling is that without some kind of automation, DMOZ cannot keep up with the pace of good quality information [and links] that is being generated in the Web every day. It is quite easy to verify this by searching for a current topic on DMOZ as compared to Wikipedia or Google. While DMOZ editors can claim the usual quality versus quantity advantages, "not being current" will be an escalating drawback that might well make DMOZ irrelevant if it remains a one-trick pony [ask for more volunteer editors] as is currently the case.

Best regards.

Overall the response seemed to be quite personal and defensive.

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I'm sorry you saw it that way, but I don't understand how it can be "personal" when I was not expressing my own opinion at all, but referring to the public mission statement of the ODP.

Whether a fee is charged for reviewing or listing, it is still a fee for an editor's work, which goes against the principle of the volunteer and Open Source. Nothing defensive, just a fact.

There also seems to be a general misunderstanding that editors are somehow uninvolved and disinterested in improvements to the way the ODP operates. Nothing could be further from the truth, and throughout this unfortunate downtime vigorous and imaginative discussions are taking place on the internal forums. The fact that these discussions cannot be seen by non-editors should not lead immediately to the assumption that they do not exist.

I can only answer what already was answered before

your suggestion that ODP becomes a paid service is so completely at odds with its social contract that I can only assume you have not read that far.

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The underlying problem is that the approach of increasing the number of volunteer editors is inherently not scalable [cannot keep up with the number of good quality sites being created every day].

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We can easely keep up with the number of good quality sites being created.
It is the other 90% of sites that is giving us problems. They are very capable in hiding the good sites for us and every other serious and honest person on the net.

jpnutch said:

The suggestions made in this forum are only to improve what the readers of the forum perceive to be an inefficient process ...

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Perceptions can be mistaken. In almost all the cases you mention, they are. Even the "improvements" are only someone's perception.

As I said before,

You cannot bend the ODP into what you want it to be. It is what it is. Period.

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That is ... a free and open directory. It was never intended, and never will be, a webmaster's SEO tool.

When everyone's perception of what the ODP really is agrees with ODP's own perception of what it is, end of problem.

The problem is not keeping up with the pace of good quality information on the net. There really isn't that much of it, relatively speaking, and it is very easy to sort and describe. The problem is avoiding being sidetracked by people who are posting sites consisting only of erroneous information plagiarized from each other, then trying to waste editor's time with malicious suggestions (both of the sites themselves, and of ways to make the editors spend more time on the malicious suggestions.)

Without that active opposition, we'd be able to keep up easily.

Old Sarge, let's put two of your statements together:
1.

Perceptions can be mistaken.

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2.

When everyone's perception of what the ODP really is agrees with ODP's own perception of what it is, end of problem.

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By your own logic, then, ODP's own perception of what it is could be mistaken.
Anyway, all these high-falutin implications that ODP somehow exists
as an abstract entity able to think for itself is all bunkum.
What it is, is the collection of its finite set of human editors; free, but not open.

Stick to editing, and leave the abstract philosophizing to abstract philosphers.

I do sympathize with all the editors' perennial and determined battle
against equally determined people trying to use the ODP as a free marketing tool for their Websites. I am definitely and completely on the side of the editors in this effort.
However, I feel that this battle cannot be won by the editors per se.
At best, it will be never ending.
Right now you are only facing human webmasters sending suggestions.
When ODP starts attracting the attention of big distributed bots, my feeling is that the editors would become overwhelmed, and many might leave. Either that, or the ODP will be unable to keep with new relevant content and become increasingly stale. Already I've experienced that ODP cannot keep with the rate at which new music acts are being generated [no, please, I don't mean to flame the music cat editors].
As hutcheson explains:

The problem is avoiding being sidetracked by people who are posting sites consisting only of erroneous information plagiarized from each other, then trying to waste editor's time with malicious suggestions (both of the sites themselves, and of ways to make the editors spend more time on the malicious suggestions.)
Without that active opposition, we'd be able to keep up easily.

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Seems like the editors are already feeling significant pressures from the spam and web-site marketing folks. This will only increase in the future.

Assuming that AOL eventually decides to keep ODP running, it is perhaps better to starting analying, now, ODP's approach of relying on increasing the number of human volunteer editors to scale up to faster and faster rates of generation of both good content sites and commercial/spam sites. Hopefully somebody with influence at ODP is thinking about how to cope with these problems in the long term. More
volunteer editors is not going to be a scalable solution.

Aside:
If any of you readers and editors know anybody with influence at AOL,
please let them know how valuable ODP is, and why AOL
should first resurrect it and then either support it or really set it free.

dying?

I've had this feeling that ODP is dying even before the hardware problems.
I've been waiting for more than a year to have my site submitted to a category that lists about 80 sites.
I went thorough all the sites and out of 80 only 5-10 are still working.
The category does not even have an editor, and they will not accept one either.
So the reason for not accepting new editors is that they may not be honest in their intentions, and at the same time the reason for not updating the category is that the 4 editors on the parent categories supposedly have 100000 sites to deal with.
Somewhere in the process the purpose of listing valid sites on appropriate categories was lost and the editor community became some sort of elite gathering complaining about the amount of work required.
It is in fact insane to expect 4 volunteers to periodically check a category with 100k sites and not at least attempt to accept more editors.
All in all, it appears that it is going to be a really really long wait for me, assuming ODP ever starts to work again properly

I went thorough all the sites and out of 80 only 5-10 are still working.

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I seriously doubt that, , but if it were true, there is a way you could report that to us, and become part of the solution. In fact, we're here, and you're here, so tell us where such a category is right now, so everybody here can go look at it and see the validity of your statement.

We do have a way to flag dead sites, and a lot of effort goes into, not just deleting them, but investigating them to see if there's a minor problem that can be fixed, or if they've changed URL's and can be found under the new URL.

It takes twice as long to do as reviewing a site suggestion, but, if one of these sites were yours, I'm sure you'd want us to make every effort to keep you in the Directory, and not just matter of factly delete you.

One of the things I wish we could make you realize, is that reviewing site suggestions is just one out of many tasks that we perform as editors, all of which are equally important.

As far as accepting new editors, yes, I would love to have more editors in the four states I edit in, but, I want honest ones who are not just there to work the system for their own benefit, and becoming an editor is only the first step, then you have to learn how to edit properly by learning the Guidelines and applying them impartially, whether it's your own, an afilliate, or your competitions site.

Until an editor does that, they are limited to a small area of the Directory, where any possible damage can be contained and easily fixed. Editors are not just allowed to run hog wild.

crowbar said:

I seriously doubt that, , but if it were true, there is a way you could report that to us, and become part of the solution. In fact, we're here, and you're here, so tell us where such a category is right now, so everybody here can go look at it and see the validity of your statement.

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http://dmoz.org/Games/Online/Virtual_Pets/Simulated_Pets/Horses/

Most of those supposedly games, are pages that moved, guest books, or expired pages.

I am obviously biased, but in all that list there are 6 genuine horse games, the others are some old forgotten pages. Some of those that have been up for 4 years have received less visitors in total than my site receives in a week.

R3D said:

that a search engine like google can still rely on this usless directory DMOZ

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define : usless . There is no us here

Not quite as bad as you stated, avh , but it really does need a lot of work. Some sites have closed, others have moved, others seem to have little or no content, two or three are dead.

You were right, it definately needs a good cleaning out, though many of the sites that have moved, left forwarding addresses, and can most likely be updated to their new URLs.

Thank you for pointing it out, I found it aggravating and less than helpful, myself, , and after looking through that category, I can see why you would get the impression that the ODP is dead or dying.

I don't have editing permissions in that area of the Directory, but, if another editor doesn't clean it up when we're back up, I'll request permission to edit there myself. I may or may not be granted that privledge, but, I'll try.