http://www.shell.linux.se/coltar/

Hmm. You might consider reading the editor's guidelines and resubmitting. There isn't a single word in that description that either gives information OR complies with the guidelines.

A: omitted--if there were two sites, there'd be two listings. The guidelines recommend omitting the subject of the verb anyway, since the site title is the obvious subject.

Humble: the mind boggles. Saved on a happy hard disk by contented electrons, and presented by righteous photons. You really know how to hit the absolutely wrong note from the beginning.

resource: a deprecated term because insofar as it means anything (which it usually doesn't), nobody can tell what it does mean.

site: doh, this is like a web directory, all we list are sites (well, or newsgroups, but they're listed separately.

for stamp collectors: first, this is false: I'll bet you anything you care to mention that you have nothing about the site that detects visitors' hobbies, much less excludes them based on their choice of hobbies; second, even if it were true, we wouldn't care; third, what does this tell people that anyone couldn't have figured out from the category name?

worldwide: First, how is the site different in this respect from any other site on the W.W.W? Secondly, it is really false since you don't provide something most people in the world can read anyway (probably because you are linguistically challenged just like most of the rest of us.)

But: does the site have _any_ content at all? Or is it just emotions poorly directed at a poorly defined audience?

Now, your site will probably get reviewed, no matter how uninformative and inane the description is -- believe it or not, we've seen worse (in fact, this isn't that far down the underside of the Bell curve. But it will get reviewed much more quickly and sympathetically if the description suggests what the reviewer should be looking for: pictures, focus, and/or catalog of personal collection? Sales, trades, want list, historical trivia, links, -- whatever.

But go ahead, resubmit. Don't worry about losing your place in the queue. With that other description, editors would have had to wait to review it until they had a barf bag handy anyway.

I see you submitted here: http://dmoz.org/Recreation/Collecting/Stamps/ and you're in the queue. As things currently stand, I personally wouldn't list your site. As I wandered around I ran into pages that wouldn't load or that took minutes to load or were blank, then somehow I ended up on http://host.bip.net/malte.a/index.html which is a mirror of your site (and a faster loading one it seems) not to mention the links that go to http://www.collectorstarget.net/ which don't work.

So you have time before your site gets reviewed. I recommend that you remove any reference to any page that doesn't work or is blank and get all your internal links pointing the same way. You probably have enough info for a listing but the blank pages really count against you. They say "not finished yet" and if you're lucky the reviewing editor shuffles your site aside to look at again in a couple of months. If you're not lucky, the submission gets deleted.

Best of luck.

I am thanking you for the very rapid answer. I am grateful for your straight answer. I will scan through the pages to look for leaks. I am also working on making the site more interactive than it is now... I am making changes and developments to the site every day...
Enough babble. Thanks again for your answer!

stampman, Sweden

<img src="/images/icons/blush.gif" alt="" />
Dear Hutcheson.

Am sorry, the description of the page given in the forum was not exact to the description I gave in the form. To be honest, I don't remember ... it was some time ago .... ;-)

As said somewhere else, I'm not perfect, but I try to be honest.

stampman, Sweden

&gt;Have been into Philately since 1963. Philatelic journalist, since 1978. Editor since 1984.

Ah, a professional editor. Admittedly imperfect, and honest also? Check out our editing guidelines. I bet you could follow them if you wanted to. Would you be interested in a high-paying job editing a small stamp category in a large web directory? Well, to be perfectly honest, not all that high paying...

Hmmm... Well...

To become an editor for dmos, does this also incur to be treated with arrogance from some other editors like you, Mr. Hutcheson? Or haven't you had your first coffee yet?

Even though if I am not an editor for dmoz, even though my little website won't be approved, even though I am little inferior in English language, even though I mean nothing to you at all, Mr. Hutcheson, I would't tolerate this behaviour of yours.... ... or should I?

Wishing you good luck in all your endeavours,

Stampman, Sweden. <img src="/images/icons/confused.gif" alt="" />

Arrogance? I'll grant you, it's a known problem of mine, but I'm serious about editing. If you have a problem with English, I didn't notice it; and I really do think anyone who can follow the stylesheet for a newspaper or magazine can easily follow the ODP editors' guidelines.

Of all the problems that keep people from being good editors, the two most common are (1) inadequate grasp of the language, and (2) belief that they are perfect and therefore don't need to read guidelines.

We have a few professional writers or editors -- obviously they are fluent in the language; they're also used to dealing with whatever stylesheets their employer or customer uses. You're an editor (I just assumed it was for an English-language publication -- but the ODP also has categories in many other languages), which answers issue #1. "Admittedly imperfect" suggests an ability to learn (issue #2). We'd already established a subject knowledge.

I can see where my post might have appeared sarcastic, after my deconstruction of the original non-site-description. But I was sincerely expressing my belief that you had the skills to be a good editor [in English, even.] I can't know whether that is something you'd _want_ to do: many people deliberately choose hobbies very different from their day jobs, and this might be too much like your work. (I'm a programmer, but hardly ever edit in the Computer categories.)

Now, the suggested site description was truly awful, by ODP standards, but it wasn't awful grammar or spelling, or incoherent. It simply didn't descrbe the site. It was a site _advertisement_, which is a very different thing. It wasn't an attempt to follow the ODP editing guidelines, possibly because you hadn't read them. (Unlike Zeal, the ODP doesn't require submitters to read the editors' guidelines.)

This has nothing to do with whether the site gets reviewed. And even if it doesn't get listed now, you can add more content (as you seemed to be planning to do anyway) and submit it again. [do give a description that mentions what content the editor should look for, though.] Generally, if a site is not obviously a "marketing-doorway", and it's rejected for "insufficient content", a second submittal a few months later will be reconsidered.