Ending status checks - a good decision

I know that editors surely do not need outside opinion on internal matters, but since that opinion has been welcomed in the past, and since this is a very important issue, I'll offer mine.

Discontinuing the status check is in my view long overdue. I suspect that it started as a courtesy to submitters, but from what I can see it had become overrun and out of control.

Hopefully those editors who fought the first line of defense in that forum can put their time to better use.

Of course, the anti-ODP group will use the discontinuation as *proof* of whatever their most recent allegation might be. But hopefully, most will see through their argument.

Good decision...

I concur

Good luck to thoses who moderated that forum. Now editors won't have to waste their time telling people how to apply correctly to the ODP or why, exactly, their site hasn't been listed. People now will actually have to follow the guidelines. Those who don't, won't get listed and those that do follow the guidelines will eventually get listed or declined. People need to spend their time working on their websites and not concentrate on 1 directory, although a very important one.

Hi,

Well. abandoning the site submission status is not godd news for people like me who often submit sites to ODP !

How do we know whether a site has been declined or not?

Jged

If you study our guidelines as to what is or isn't listable and evaluate your website against them, you should be able to work out if it's eligible or not.

If you've suggested your site and it's listable, it'll be listed in time.
If it isn't, it won't be.

What would you do if you knew your website had been declined as unlistable?
Why can't you do that now ?

"Frequent submitters" are, of course, our biggest problem. Every DAY we get six or seven THOUSAND submittals a day that are pure spam -- a waste of our time to review, a waste of a surfer's time to visit, no loss to anyone (except the spammer) if the server crashed and the backup disks burned.

And here's the crux of the problem. In our experience, that spam cannot be reconstituted into live pigs or cattle (or horses...) We don't WANT to see it again, once was twice too often!

But the frequent submitters are asking for a status simply because they EXPECT to submit it (or something very much like it) again as soon as it is rejected. In their mind, they expected any site to be transformable into a silk ear by the application of a few mindless tweaks.

One of the things the "site status" forum DID accomplish was: for anyone who cared to look at the evidence, it vindicated the editors' representation and exposed the submitters' delusions. We did make suggestions about "potentially listable" sites. We did address problems with sites that had been inappropriately rejected. Some people believed we didn't ever address issues, because they only read a few threads, or a few dozen threads, and never saw an actual case. But ANYONE, editor or not, could peruse that forum, read a few thousand posts, and see how truly rare such sites were: several addressable issues a month, out of a thousand or so status requests.

The site status helped solve human errors

The OPD is a human directory people make mistakes and technology is not perfect.
Many people that post there had a good reason. They sumitted their siteand after 6,8,12 months nothing happened. no response, no declined notice nothing. Maybe they made a mistake in the category because we are NOT editors and not SO inteligent web savy people that we do get things incorrect sometimes.
Sometimes editors change or submissions are forgotten or a mistake is made so people like me after half a year come ack to drop a note.
Well what to we do now? I don't care if it takes 2-4 weeks for an editor to tell me that I have done everything correctly an must wait. Or that I must submit to another category. Just that someone in the human directory is really listening.

Well, I missed the boat on the deadline a few days late after six months of patient waiting.

So what now? If I didn't believe that the ODP was a good thing I'd give up.

Many people that post there had a good reason.

Click to expand...

But most did not.

They sumitted their siteand after 6,8,12 months nothing happened. no response, no declined notice nothing.

Click to expand...

They made a suggestion that we include a site in our project, and we review every suggestion made. What the vast majority were/are interested in is the commercial value of a listing. That doesn't form even a tiny part of our objectives and therefore status checks add zero to the project, and take up time that could be spent on editing or discussing improvements internally or mentoring new editors, so a negative in fact.

Maybe they made a mistake in the category because we are NOT editors and not SO inteligent web savy people that we do get things incorrect sometimes.

Click to expand...

Editors spend most of their time correcting placements of suggestions, correcting titles, correcting descriptions. If the site is worthy of listing and not so carelessly submitted that it appears as spam - e.g. a real estate agent submitting their site to the category for web designers, then we will always correct every mistake.

Well what to we do now?

Click to expand...

What you should have been doing before: follow guidelines to decide whether to submit a site, do your best to get the category right, suggest proper titles and descriptions, then forget it - when we are ready to review it we will and if you've followed the guidelines then it will most likely get listed.

Hi hi,

Just a quick question:

With the news that submission status has been abolished, is there any way to find out if my site is being considered? I understand that there are many reasons for the termination of this process, one of the main ones being that it would take up a considerable amount of time for moderators. I therefore agree that this is a realistic decision.

Just reading through postings, there are so many different arguments for and against alot of contaversial issues (such as things like automated public functions in relation to listing status), so I recognise that many of the ODP attributes are structured the way they are for a reason.

But in the case of my site submission < http://www.stitchnpatch.com.au > I read the submission guidlines and adheard to them. When I discovered that there was a submission status forum, i requested the status for my site.

It eventuated that my submission had not been received by ODP, and was therefore not in line for reveiw. (reference http://resource-zone.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=37390 ).

If this is the case again, then I might be unknowingly waiting for submission confirmation for the rest of my life, without my site actually being submitted. In this scenario, I had adheared to the guidlines and not submitted unsuitable content, but still failed to be listed as a website.

Obviously I cannot keep submitting my website, as this would be detrimental to both myself and the ODP (1- My submission would be counted as spam and rejected, never to be listed. 2- It would heighten the work load of moderators sorting through submissions).

What options are available?

Any feedback, thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.

The actual answer you got in that thread was that we were unable to give you an answer and that it was not found in any of the categories you mentioned.

In fact in most cases, submitters who got told that we could not find their site had in fact provided the wrong category, and in fact the site was received, it's just we have no way of telling unless you provided the actual category or an editor actually did something with the site.

So an automated system will never help, since users would often be putting in the wrong category and the system would also tell them the site was not there.

Even though you gave three categories, at this point I can tell none of them was the one you had actually submitted the site to.

So what can you do?

You can periodically browse the likely categories to see if it appears.
You can check your logs to see if you are getting traffic from DMOZ.org
You can use Google or Yahoo or any number of other search engines to do a restricted search only on our contents.

Those will let you know that you site has been listed.

There is no way for a non-editor to check the unreviewed queue.

There is also the reality that in many categories it may take an editor three years just to look at a site.

Thank you for making clear my misinterpretation on that posting. I will take your advice and check the ODP database periodically. I would like to ask a couple more questions if I may:

1- Because I resubmitted my site to another catagory (after misunderstanding the reply I received) will this be counted as spam and therefore black listed?

2- Spectregunner, the tip you mentioned of searching ODP through search engines would be quite a useful tool. Could you give me a brief outline of how to do this?

I appreciate the replies I have received, thank you.

P.S. - Nice quotes Bobrat

evstar deluxe said:

1- Because I resubmitted my site to another catagory (after misunderstanding the reply I received) will this be counted as spam and therefore black listed?

Click to expand...

Two submissions does not a spammer make. Don't worry about it.

evstar deluxe said:

2- Spectregunner, the tip you mentioned of searching ODP through search engines would be quite a useful tool. Could you give me a brief outline of how to do this?

Click to expand...

Here's the technique for Google. Simply enter the following as the search:

You can also use the "Advanced" search page which offers the ability to limit searches to a site (which simply formats your search properly as above). Other search engines will have slightly different techniques.

hm...

site:dmoz.org devany.com

Into Google reports "did not match any documents."

But, searching Dmoz for devany.com reports the site in two categories.

I think there may be a problem with this technique.

*shrug* Maybe googlebot hasn't gotten around to spidering it yet.

site:dmoz.org google.com gives me results.

did not work for me either. When I used google advanced search it constructed a different string of but also failed. using the domain part of the name in an advance search against dmoz.org gave me a couple of hundred of dmoz results. Could be regional difference in google - I was using UK.

Bill C

I'm in the UK. Google now forces a redirect from google.com to google.co.uk but has a link to go to google.com

Using both google.co.uk and google.com the results were the same:-

site:dmoz.org bbc.co.uk

- Returned two peculiar entries, neither of which was the BBC.

site:dmoz.org ibm.com

- Returned the same entry as one the of bbc entries. (A list of domains)

site:dmoz.org southbucksrda.org

- Returned "did not match any documents." (I'm pretty sure this site has been listed in dmoz for a few years.)

This is more than a spider issue.

Discussion on the returns by search engines is off topic in one way, yet right on the button in another.

With status checks discontinued, it would be helpfull to have a sticky giving working code for non-spammers to check the listings.

In that vein - is it appropriate to continue this discussion here, or should a new thread be started to discuss these peculiar returns?

Thanks
Bill

It's actually really beyond the scope of this forum to continue discussing it at all. It's a Google issue, not an ODP issue. So the answer to your question is please don't continue it here and please don't start a new thread about it. Thanks.

If you use the search on the front page of dmoz.org and just search on the domain name (without any subdomains) it should pull up the listings in the directory.

There are also loads of our data users out there - see:
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/.../Open_Directory_Project/Sites_Using_ODP_Data/

Some of whom may have implemented more reliable search algorithms than the dmoz one.

On Google Advaced you can not search for a site in this way, you can only sreach for text on dmoz not for url's
Search for "ibm site:dmoz.org" does work
Search for "ibm.com site:dmoz.org" will only return a page with the text 'ibm.com'