Funny...website, 8 years, 3 months and about 3 days old...no response

allgaeu

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
14
Hello,

funny isnt it?

Last submitting of site was about 7 months ago.....no response.....nothing.....

What can i do?

greetz

allgaeu
 

jimnoble

DMOZ Meta
Joined
Mar 26, 2002
Messages
18,915
Location
Southern England
You might have misunderstood our objectives and how we operate here. ODP is a volunteer organisation building a directory as a hobby. Editors edit where they wish, when they wish and as much as they wish within the constraints of their permissions. We have no schedules or systems to force people to do work that they don't volunteer to do. ODP is not primarily a free listing service for website owners and it does not attempt to process their listing suggestions within the time scales desired by them.

Some volunteer will process your listing suggestion in time but we can't predict who or when that might be. Elapsed times can range from a few days to a few years. There is no need to re-suggest your website and doing so could be counter-productive because a later suggestion overwrites any earlier one.

You need do nothing. Instead, I suggest you focus your energies on other means of promoting your website.
 

allgaeu

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
14
Hello,

thanks for your answer.

Plz dont say i would not understand your objectives and how you operate.
But its a joke if i try to suggest a website for over 7 years and nothing happens.

Thats why the header starts with "Funny".

Bye
allgaeu
 

pvgool

kEditall/kCatmv
Curlie Meta
Joined
Oct 8, 2002
Messages
10,093
allgaeu said:
Plz dont say i would not understand your objectives and how you operate.
But its a joke if i try to suggest a website for over 7 years and nothing happens.
You know that these two statements contradict each other.
If you did understand how DMOZ works you would know that your suggestion was succesfull and that a suggestion might lead to a listing.
You also would know that by suggesting the same website more than once you yourself might be the reason that the website is not listed yet.
Every new suggestion of that website in the same category would overwrite the previous one resetting the date we received the suggestion. If an editor reviews suggestions in date order (not all editors do) yours will never be reviewed.
If you suggested the website to different categories and did it often enough it might have been marked as spam.
In both cases you should blame yourself. How funny is that. ;)
 

windharp

Meta/kMeta
Curlie Meta
Joined
Apr 30, 2002
Messages
9,204
well, i thought german and english forum are seperated.
Those are both subforums of Resource Zone. Asking the identical question in several places is some sort of spam. And editors like me spend twice the time, reading the same question in two languages.

Oder um ein Beispiel aus dem realen Leben zu verwenden: Wenn Du bspw. zu Deiner Bank gehst um was zu fragen, stellst Du Dich dann auch an jedem Schaltern einmal an? Sind ja schliesslich andere Mitarbeiter hinter den Schaltern... :)
 

hutcheson

Curlie Meta
Joined
Mar 23, 2002
Messages
19,136
>But its a joke if i try to suggest a website for over 7 years and nothing happens.

Sober fact: most suggestions will never result in a listing, because the suggested websites aren't listable.

The right thing to happen in those cases is, nothing.

And that's what happens, hundreds of thousands of times every year.

You may believe your site is different: but 99% of the rejected suggestions were also from people who believed their site was different, so we can't really get any significant information from your belief.
 

allgaeu

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
14
pvgool said:
You know that these two statements contradict each other.
If you did understand how DMOZ works you would know that your suggestion was succesfull and that a suggestion might lead to a listing.
You also would know that by suggesting the same website more than once you yourself might be the reason that the website is not listed yet.
Every new suggestion of that website in the same category would overwrite the previous one resetting the date we received the suggestion. If an editor reviews suggestions in date order (not all editors do) yours will never be reviewed.
If you suggested the website to different categories and did it often enough it might have been marked as spam.
In both cases you should blame yourself. How funny is that. ;)

Hello,

thanks for your reply.
I saw in the FAQs: If the suggestion was not listed you can try it a month later again and then you have to wait.

Also i know that you should not suggest your website every month. I did it 6 times in 7,5 years.
Also i did not know that my was succesfull and it could be listed.

Iam sorry, but i cant know everythink. I read the most important points. Of course i cant know everythink...but therefore i wrote a thread in this forum.
Now you told me. Fine. Thanks for the info!

greetz
allgaeu
 

allgaeu

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
14
hutcheson said:
>But its a joke if i try to suggest a website for over 7 years and nothing happens.

Sober fact: most suggestions will never result in a listing, because the suggested websites aren't listable.

The right thing to happen in those cases is, nothing.

And that's what happens, hundreds of thousands of times every year.

You may believe your site is different: but 99% of the rejected suggestions were also from people who believed their site was different, so we can't really get any significant information from your belief.

Hi,

also this information is new for me.
Thanks.

greetz
allgaeu
 

allgaeu

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
14
pvgool said:
If you suggested the website to different categories and did it often enough it might have been marked as spam.
In both cases you should blame yourself. How funny is that. ;)

Would not be tooo funny. So i understand now....thanks for your time and if i annoyed you i appologize.

bye
allgaeu
 

dmoz_am

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
4
Does the whole submission and editing process have to be so mysterious? Would it really hurt to let a submitter know why a website submission was not accepted. Does it have to be so Kafkaesque?

I understand this is a process run by undoubtedly respectable people volunteering their spare time to provide integrity and richness to the web. But the one sided nature of the submission and communication seems to run against the spirit and nature of the web. To obliquely say (that too in a forum) that failed submitters did not follow the submission guidelines without giving specific advice or guidance is too insulting to the trusting (may be sometimes misguided) submitters. I understand that without discipline this system is ripe for abuse. But, in this day and age, with the technological advances and controls we have, if we say that this is the only way we can work, DMOZ is not truly representative of the spirit of WWW.

If Google decides to leave China for the censorship, I am a little nonplussed why they rely on this long drawn and opaque website submission process. As a user of several Google services including Google adwords, if I am blocked from improving my website page ranking due to an archaic, truly bureaucratic process, I question google's reliance on DMOZ so heavily.
 

pvgool

kEditall/kCatmv
Curlie Meta
Joined
Oct 8, 2002
Messages
10,093
dmoz_am said:
Does the whole submission and editing process have to be so mysterious? Would it really hurt to let a submitter know why a website submission was not accepted. Does it have to be so Kafkaesque?
Ahh. But every submitter already can know if the website he suggests will be accepted or rejected. He just ahs to read the guidelines. That is why we (the DMOZ editors) see no reason to tell people that we have found that they suggested a website while we asked not to suggest such websites.

DMOZ is not truly representative of the spirit of WWW.
I have never seen DMOZ make such a claim.

If Google decides to leave China for the censorship, I am a little nonplussed why they rely on this long drawn and opaque website submission process.
It may be new to you but Google has never relied on the DMOZ submission process. Atleast not for their search engine. They have their own ways of detecting websites to include in their search.

As a user of several Google services including Google adwords, if I am blocked from improving my website page ranking due to an archaic, truly bureaucratic process,
The DMOZ process has never been created to improve page rank of any website. It is not our problem that people think PR is so important. They should focus on the things that realy matter.

I question google's reliance on DMOZ so heavily.
That is something you will have to ask Google. From what I have read they do not rely heavily on DMOZ at all, and never have.
Unless ofcourse if you are speaking of the Google Directory. That ofcourse is a copy of the DMOZ directory. Just like anyone else Google is allowed to create such a copy as log as they follow our policy.
 

jimnoble

DMOZ Meta
Joined
Mar 26, 2002
Messages
18,915
Location
Southern England
There are plenty of threads here describing the best way to suggest a website so no need to repeat it in this one. We don't decline websites because they've been suggested to the wrong category or with crappy titles or descriptions - we fix them. We do decline websites that are unlistable because of business model or inadequate content, but those guidelines are publicly spelled out too.

Most website owners already know if they have a business model that we decline and no amount of redesign is going to fix that. Most close to zero unique content website owners know that too.
DMOZ is not truly representative of the spirit of WWW.
I'll take that as a compliment. Have you not noticed the effects of competitive SEO, doorways and affiliate link farms on the SERPS?

As to Google, they are just a downstream data user of our free services. If you think they shouldn't, perhaps you should discuss it with them.
 

hutcheson

Curlie Meta
Joined
Mar 23, 2002
Messages
19,136
Would it really hurt to let a submitter know why a website submission was not accepted.

Yes, we've tried it, and, yes, it really REALLY hurts.

long drawn and opaque website submission process

What opacity? You make a suggestion, as soon as a volunteer looks at it and agrees a change needs to be made, the change is immediately visible to anyone. That's as transparent as it gets.

You make a suggestion of your own site. You know all about that site and that suggestion. What could someone who hasn't looked at either one, tell you about them? Reality is opaque to us (because we haven't tried to look through it, but it's perfectly transparent to you.

There's only one other possibility. You make a suggestion, someone here reviews it and thinks it looks like a bad idea.

Why a bad idea? Well, they didn't find any unique content on the site. But you already know better than anyone what unique content is on the site, because you know where you got the information from. Again, all the transparency in the universe is on your side.

But if you knew there was unique content on the site, why didn't the reviewer find it? And if you think about that question a moment, you'll realize that's one question the reviewer is NEVER going to be able to answer. If he'd found the content, he'd know how he found it and where he found it. But he can't give you a list of all the pages on the website he didn't find, and he CERTAINLY can't give a list of all the kinds of content that WOULD have been unique, that WEREN'T present on the site.

The reason you're seeing opacity is that you're looking for something that doesn't exist.

The only other consideration is abuse.

--Submitter abuse (which is involved in the majority of all suggestions) and obviously no feedback is deserved in those cases.
--Editor abuse (which is rare but does occur) and obviously no honest feedback could be expected in THOSE cases.

In disagreements between editors and submitters, in my experience, at least 99% of the time the editor is following the ODP rules and the submitter isn't. If the submitter doesn't care about the ODP rules, why would he care about ... the editor's interpretation of the ODP rules?

Dig as deep as you want in questions like this, you always come to the same thing. Nobody knows any information that the honest website suggester doesn't know but could use.
 

dmoz_am

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2010
Messages
4
Just a couple more points.

By opacity, I simply mean that you don't know the reason your site submission was rejected and never will do.

If posting promoting commercial entities is forbidden by DMOZ then I have no argument. What perplexes me, however, is that I see many commercial entities listed.
 

makrhod

Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2004
Messages
1,899
There seems to be a basic misunderstanding here.
If posting promoting commercial entities is forbidden by DMOZ
This forum is run by volunteer editors as a service to provide information about the ODP, and is therefore not the place for webmasters to promote their websites.

What perplexes me, however, is that I see many commercial entities listed.
Commercial sites are certainly listed in the ODP, provided they meet the criteria for selection. But it is editors who find and add those sites, not the webmasters themselves.

And as for
you don't know the reason your site submission was rejected
The explanation can be found in the public guidelines, this forum's FAQ, previous posts in this thread, and indeed many thousands of similar threads. So there can be no excuse for not knowing the answer. ;)
 

gloria

Curlie Meta
Joined
Mar 25, 2002
Messages
388
To know why a site was rejected, one just has to look at the guidelines. That is exactly what editors do.

Initially, we gave status reports and the reasons why sites were not listed on this forum. It didn't work the way that we thought that it would. People wouldn't believe us and started arguments. Imagine us telling someone that there wasn't enough unique content on their site. "Of course there is. I wrote it all!" "Um, sorry, but these pages are word-for-word copies of the CIA Fact Book." Then they would rehash the pages, and insist once again that it was unique content. Or add a few paragraphs and ask if the site now had enough unique content. No, it didn't. Then they'd add a few more paragraphs and ask again. It was incredible time sink with no positive results.

There was an employment site where the entire point of the site was the search feature for available jobs. It didn't work. Searches for New York or California turned up zero jobs. But the owner came and argued until he was finally convinced to try the search himself. That was one of the extremely rare times that telling someone the reason actually worked. So rare that I remember it clearly, but it took quite a bit of time from various editors to convince him. Not to mention the fact that we were telling spammers, lead generators and similar sites exactly how we detected them and ended up inadvertently helping them to better disguise their sites.
 

jkburnett

Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2008
Messages
2
Companies are in business to make money and dmoz is a small piece of the competitive landscape, no matter what the dmoz intentions are. I always find it interesting that a competitor or 2 gets listed while they wait years; and I've witnessed the same posting conditions. It's a very subjective directory due to the human nature. There is also a lot of anger I notice in these types of thread responses, also very human. Good luck out there to both editor and submitters.
 
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