help,I have a question.

hi,editors.first,thank you for working for us and replying our questions.
I have a question. if someone submits his site for many times. are you sure
you will refuse to list it?
thank you
du

As per the submission guidelines you are supposed to submit your site to ONE category. The ONE that you think it best fits in. If you submitted your site to a couple of different categories because you did not know you are probably OK but if you submitted it all over the directory numerous times you might have problems. Hope this helps.

Editorial judgment ... has that been mentioned before here?

Some sites definitely get to the point where we don't care how good they are, we can get along without their owners' incessant importunity. Other sites are good enough that we make an effort to shut their promoters up. And most (by a small majority) site submittals are so bad that even one submittal counts as conspiracy-to-commit-distributed-denial-of-service-spam.

So, guess what? we don't know which category the site you care about is in, until we review it.

But it is VERY safe to say, confidently, assuredly, emphatically: EVERY site on the web would be better off if it's NOT submitted abusively -- that is, if people had followed the submittal policies and submitted twice (at most).

Sometimes ODP editors can repair the damage in reputation caused by an abusively submitted site. Sometimes electronic means keep us from even noticing. And ... sometimes the abuse is so bad that the only thing that matters is for us to avoid hearing anything more from the webmaster ever. But conscientious editors will always ask about abusive submittals -- "if there's a line, they go at the back. If there's no line, we'll make a line to put them at the back. We cannot afford to reward such rude, greedy, selfish, and antisocial behavior -- or we will be overwhelmed by the rude, greedy, selfish, and antisocial people.

I know, some people justify their rudeness by saying, "I didn't know any better." That is no excuse, and such ignorance is justly penalized. The fact is, anyone who can read COULD have known better; anyone with pretentions to professionalism SHOULD have known better; anyone with a kindergarten diploma and a conscience OUGHT to have known better. This is not rocket science, folks: it's just asking yourself "what would happen if everyone acted like I do?" -- just like your mother said when you were five years old. It's just writing down everything they told you in telemarketing 101, and not doing any of it in public. It's basic humanity. And, for those intent on self-interest above all anyway, it's more effective also -- because you're dealing with human editors who will react to defend themselves and their community from vicious manipulation.

abuse abuse

Something I've been wondering about: how would ODP editors know that it's someone affiliated with the website doing the abusive submitting? How to know if it's not a competitor wanting to bestow a spam reputation on the site? To be honest, that's the first thing I thought about when I read 54163's question...
Rob

thank you for your replying.
A question is: if someone submits his competitor's website to the same Catalogue for many times, how do the editors know? Perhaps it is not submited by the Host of the site.
best regards.

It has happened. It doesn't happen very often at all.

It's amazing how many spammers think all editors are total idiots, though, and take this as a serious theory.

Think about it for a moment. Your site may be the center of the universe for you, but for the spammer next door, HIS site is the center of the universe, and you are just one of ten thousand competitors. Why would he single you out for this kind of attention? Of course, chances are even if he were so stupid (and a few of them are), he'd pick some other of his competitors rather than you. And ... editors have a lot more empathy with his opinion of your site (and yours of his) than vice versa.

The same non-solipsistic perspective will help protect you from a lot of idiotic fears. You think there's an editor who's a competitor, and singles your site (all alone out of dozens or hundreds of other competitors) for special disdain? You think Sergei Brin spends his lunch hour hunting down your pages by hand, and deleting them from the Google index? You think the aliens in black helicopter-shaped UFOs that killed Kennedy are following you now? (I'm not making this up -- I couldn't make this stuff up.) You are obsessively fixated on yourself. Grow up, learn to feed yourself, get real! This stuff really doesn't happen to most people, and unless you really contrived to make a lot of people mad (which, come to think of it, probably describes all spammers), you really don't have anything to worry about.

It's the aliens in black Chrysler-shaped hovercraft that you have to watch out for. Oh, and Bill Gates is using Russian computer retroviruses to drain your bank account.

if someone submits his competitor's website to the same Catalogue for many times, how do the editors know? Perhaps it is not submited by the Host of the site.

Click to expand...

Most submissions are not made by the owner or host of a website. Believe it or not, but quite often somebody will submit a bunch of competitors in addition to their own site, to help build a new sub-category for instance. (The kind of people who do that often apply to become editors ) We don't care who suggested a site. We don't consider a submittal from a site owner as better as a submittal from someone else, and many of the sites that are listed were never submitted at all.

That being said, yes, there are a very few very stupid people who think they can make their competitors' lives more difficult by spamming the directory with their sites. There are ways to find that out - but you'll have to trust me on that one, for it would be a very silly idea of me to reveal how it is done!

A bigger problem, if the site owners only knew it, are the SEO firms who spam the directory with their clients' sites, and think that will make them get listed quicker. And that does happen quite a lot. Those sites won't be blacklisted, but it will probably take a very long time for them to be reviewed; much longer than it would have taken if all the SEO firms cared about the rules for submission. The sad thing is that people actually pay those firms money to take care of their sites...

this is not about me

hutcheson said:

Why would he single you out for this kind of attention?

Click to expand...

Hutcheson - you assume I'm talking about any site in particular, or my site specifically. And in that case, you'd be absolutely right - my site isn't on anybody's radar screen (I don't even have "competitors"), and I agree with the statistics of unlikelyhood you cite. But even though the preponderance of posts here are very one-site oriented (due to the very nature of these forums), please accept that some members are just curious about things - in my case, because I hope to be on the editing side myself. And certainly, given the regularity of seeing individuals get enraged in the forums, there is a contingent of people who harbor ill will towards the directory. I don't think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to assume that some of them take some kind of counteraction. The same could be said about people holding a grudge against a competitor - while nobody would try to derail ALL their competitors, if for whatever reason someone really loathed a particular competing site, who knows...
Nea - Thanks, I guess I'll find out how to thwart such attempts if/when I attain editor status.

RobBroekhuis - you could spend years as an editor and never see such a case. I never have and I've made 80,000 edits. When Nea says very few, she means very, very, very, very few indeed. It's roughly as rare as a pink hippo outside of Disney.

I have seen such cases. I could count them on my fingers. While wearing mittens. But you could probably count the number of editors who had seen them ... well, you MIGHT have to take off one sock and use decimal notation.

See, it's also a counterinstinctual thing. Spammers tend to think lots of repetition is EFFECTIVE. So why do something effective for a competitor?

All things considered, it's really really not a problem. Last time I saw it, I actually felt that I had the time to write a dozen e-mail letters to the webmasters victimized ... think I'd do that for a run-of-the-mill spammer? No, I look for a way to use weapons of mass rejection.

Malice isn't smart, and it usually isn't clever. The "Professor Moriarty Myth" is a child of fantasy, nursed by ignorance. As an editor, only in the "high affiliate spam target categories" would you normally find extremely sneaky vicious spam. Elsewhere -- stupid spam, ignorant spam ... basically, spammers all do the same thing, and an editor develops a nose for that thing.

Fair enough. Less malicious abuse is good (even if self-serving abuse continues to proliferate )
Thanks for clarifying

Yes, such a question must always be asked of a particular site. But the answer is fully generalizable: the same answer applis to almost every conceivable particular site.

With sufficient information, you can find exceptions where there really is a reason (although not a legitimate one) to pan a legitimate site: two realtors in a particular town that really hate each other...two wannabe-alpha-wolf persons in a small niche artistic community, a political/religious figure that's both significant (in more than a "celebrity" sense), outspoken, and uniquely far out of the mainstream.

And these happen: more often it's editors against each other, or editor-against-submitter. These you'd have to take your socks off to count. And they are treated as potential abuse cases.