Finally....after 13 months

Finally, after 13 months, an editor had a look at my site last week.

I just hope he was not using Firefox as a very small HTML problem prevented the site from showing on Firefox but not on other browsers.

I am through the waiting for an editor to visit. Now the waiting is whether the site will be listed or not. I hope it gets listed. Please....

Thanks to the editor who took time to visit my site.

You can't draw any conclusion from a dmoz.org referrer in your logs. It might have been an error checking robot or maybe an editor was moving your suggestion to a better category to await further evaluation.

Many editors, including me, use Firefox because of its glittering array of its useful addons. If a site is broken, I'll generally try it in IE as well. Other editors might not.

Over 20% of surfers use Firefox. Is there some reason why you don't just fix the 'very small HTML problem' that excludes them from your site?

This is a protion of the referrer:

editors/editunrev/listurl?cat=Computers/Graphics/Fonts/Repositories/Free&mode=power

Did I rejoice too early or an editor really did pay my site a visit?

If that is not an editor evaluating my site then I have to wait some more until someone evaluates the site. If that means an editor evaluated my site, then he might not have liked the site since it is still not listed on the directory. Too bad the site has unique content that you won't find in other sites of its kind. Still, I appreciate the time the editor took to visit the site and respects his/her decision.

Since my site opened April last year, over 40% of my visitors use various versions of Firefox (35% use Firefox 3). I use IE6 to do the HTMLs since I can open the HTML in Notepad when I click on Edit or select View Source. I hand code my HTMLs in Notepad.

The problem was that I am using XHTML 1 Transitional as DTD and inserted a plea/request to visitors who likes to look at HTML source in a comment. What triggered the problem was that I used two consecutive hyphens inside the comment. Highly compliant browsers, like Firefox, interpreted the comment ended when it encountered the two hyphens and that is my small HTML problem. Everything after the comment were not rendered by the browser and instead showed a whitespace. I forgot to test the page in Firefox before uploading them. The problem was fixed by simply removing one of the two hyphens but before it was fixed, the DMOZ editor already had a look-see. I guess he/she did not like what he/she saw.

For over a year the site was waiting for an editor to visit and when an editor did pay a visit he/she saw what a sorry mess the site was. Tough luck for me.

he might not have liked the site

Click to expand...

Liking or not liking should not affect listing or not listing, though a broken/invisible display issue would be considered.
Many editors check poorly displaying sites in other popular browsers and platforms before rejecting them - if the site works properly in at least one, we add [may not display in all browsers] to the end of the description.
Not all editors make a decision in one visit anyway, and some visits are made to sort poorly suggested sites to better categories - but since we don't deal with specific sites here, the best you can do as you have fixed an important issue, is re-suggest the site once - perhaps mentioning at the end of the description that a compatibility issue has been recently fixed.

What I meant by like is that the editor, for some reason, did not consider the site acceptable for the directory. Whether the non-display was a factor, I do not knnow but you mentioned that non-display in one browser (the site opens as intended in Internet Explorer and Safari) is a not an issue. The editor rejected the site for some reason because the site has not appeared in the directory since the visit, assuming that the snippet of the URL I posted means that an editor evaluated the site.

If I resubmit the site, wouldn't it end up the same way? And another year of waiting since the category does not have an editor. A DMOZ listing would have given the site a wider reach.

I am not questioning the outcome of my submission. At least I know someone at DMOZ evaluated the site and that it was not just buried under a pile of pending submissions.

BTW even if DMOZ has protocols in place with respect to site evaluation, the evaluation process is very subjective and depends entirely on the editor doing the evaluation.

Thanks

The editor rejected the site for some reason because the site has not appeared in the directory since the visit, assuming that the snippet of the URL I posted means that an editor evaluated the site.

Click to expand...

No, you can't assume that. All that a referrer with "URL editors/editunrev/listurl?cat=Computers/Graphics/Fonts/Repositories/Free&mode=power" in it tells you is that an editor opened up the list of sites suggested to that category. It doesn't tell you what they did when they were there. You can't tell if they ever even looked at your site, let alone rejected it.

Assume is the only thing one can do since there is no rejecton notice.

When you see a DMOZ URL, you assume that an editor visited your site and evaluated it. If your site get listed in the directory after the visit means you assumed right and you got what you wanted. If not, you assume that it has been rejected.

I have submitted sites to ODP before and they got listed after a similar URL appeared in the logs. I can't assume? I assume based on experience. Whether this is true in this case, only the editor who opened the list can tell for sure.

If my site gets listed in the coming days or weeks or months or years without resubmitting means that I assumed wrong. In the meantime, my assumption stands as far as I am concerned.

Prove me wrong!

Perhaps "No, you can't assume that" should have been "No, you shouldn't assume that", but you're quite correct that you are free to assume whatever you like.