Here are a couple that would not be hard to implement and *might* reduce the number of status requests without category url's or date:
a) In Step 4 of the Instructions for submitting a site, add a sentence like "Keep a careful note of the category you have submitted to and the date, you will not get a confirmation email, you will need this information if you wish to check the status of your suggested site at the dmoz public forum."
b) At the end of the submission process, how about delivering a page that says "thank you for your suggestion, date, category url, www.example.com. It is recommended that you print or make a record of this page, you will not receive a confirmation email."
Please forgive me if this already happens, I have only done it once (and made a handwritten note of what I did)
The reasoning is that the web has trained us all too well in a different direction. We submit all sorts of things every day, registrations for forums, memberships of sites, orders for products and services - and every time there is a confirmation email waiting in the inbox before we even get to it
But this time it is different, the email won't be there (and I think I understand why not) - so anything that can be done to pre-warn first time submitters will help them. It is of course appreciated that many people will not read, but plenty will.
Another post asked to be able to see which sites have been recently added to the directory (noted this thread is very old) - it is really easy to do this already:
Find a recently updated ODP category, scroll down to the bottom of the page, right click the little green button there and select "open in a new window" this will open the page Google has built from ODP data, it will most often lag behind by a month or more (sadly the Google page is not date-stamped) This new page is sorted by Google page-rank, but there is an option to sort it alphabetically. Once this is done, resize both windows so they can fit side by side and comparison is then easy. Newly added and deleted (or moved) sites can then be looked at in new windows or tabs.
(Watch out for for sites whose title starts with "The" dmoz has them sorted by the second word, the Google directory will sort them under T)
:confuse2: 