I don't mind saying I'm the anonymous editor mentioned above. But I don't think it's correct to call the trap an "anti-spam" feature. As I understand it, for technical reasons that I don't fully understand, the server has always had problems with some submissions (having to do with the way it handles pending forms.) In the old days, submitters were given a message saying "please send this to
xxx@dmoz.org" (hence called a "manual" submittal.) Most people didn't bother--those submittals were just lost to us.
About a month ago, the system began to dump those submittals into a Test category, where we take a quick look at them and try to pass them along to the category where they were submitted (or if it's an obvious misfit, a better category, or even the "badly misplaced--needs help" catchall category.)
Some may have suspected that these sites would be mostly spam, and in fact that was my first impression, but after looking at a few thousand of them, my current feeling is that they are very much like the rest of the directory: containing a large minority of EACH of good submittals, useless repeated submittals, and pure spam.
So, it's a filter, but not a spam filter. I do weed out some blatant spam, but I also redirect some sites to a better category much more quickly than they might otherwise have been.
But for those pests who submit their domain name before they develop their sites (hoping, I suppose, to develop them while the submittal is progressing down the pipeline) -- have I mentioned lately how counterproductive this strategy is? There is no pipeline out of this swamp, there are merely thousands of editors wandering around the swamp, scooping water into buckets with soupspoons. The scum often gets scooped out quickly. What you get is not a prominent place in the pipeline, what you get is the beginning of a bad reputation for your site. And, while this is not a goal or priority for ODP editors, we can rejoice in seeing justice happen.
