Is my site really that bad?

I've tried three or four times over the past couple of years to get my site listed on DMOZ. I just feel incredibly frustrated, because my site doesn't violate any of the guidelines and it's not a crappy site. It's just my art. Does the person in charge of the category just hate my art? I don't know what to do. I thought that if your website was decently designed and had decent content you could get on DMOZ. Every time I submit I wait a few months. Always, nothing.


My site is http://kashaniarts.com . It's just an art portfolio. The site isn't half-assed either. I put a lot of work into it to make it nice-looking and easy to use. Will someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong? Am I on someone's "bad" list? Did I screw up somehow?

Maybe DMOZ disagrees with me, but I don't see any reason to not include it. It's not ugly, it's not purely commercial, a lot of people like my art, so it can't be so bad that DMOZ doesn't think it's worth including...right?

Anyone have advice? If I'm doing something wrong, I'd like to be able to correct it. If they think I did something against the rules I'd at least like to be able to explain to them that I didn't mean to do anything wrong.

Any advice we offered would be a form of a status report.

By the rules of the forum, we cannot tell you if your submissions have been declined or are still waiting.

You might want to look at our FAQ and get a solid understanding of the wait times that are often encountered.

I'm sorry that this is probably not the answer you hoped for, but it is probably the only real answer we can give.

I think maybe your biggest mistake is that you were expecting "deadline service". When your deadline passed without any response, then ... you assumed something about what some volunteer was or was not doing.

The volunteer didn't know about your deadline (not that he would have cared if he knew.) So ... any assumptions you made based on it are invalid, and probably wrong.

A more realistic appraisal: in my experience, I've gotten the impression that the ODP seems to attract more verbal-oriented than graphics-oriented editors; this may be because the creative part of editing is symbol-oriented. And this may perhaps explain why Literature categories seem more aggressively edited than Graphic Arts categories. (Music falls somewhere in the middle, would be my impression.)

Does the person in charge of the category just hate my art?

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We're editors, not art critics, and no editor should delete your site suggestion because of the reason you mentioned. Wherever you suggested your site, backlog is a more likely reason for any delay.

hutcheson said:

I think maybe your biggest mistake is that you were expecting "deadline service". When your deadline passed without any response, then ... you assumed something about what some volunteer was or was not doing.

The volunteer didn't know about your deadline (not that he would have cared if he knew.) So ... any assumptions you made based on it are invalid, and probably wrong.

A more realistic appraisal: in my experience, I've gotten the impression that the ODP seems to attract more verbal-oriented than graphics-oriented editors; this may be because the creative part of editing is symbol-oriented. And this may perhaps explain why Literature categories seem more aggressively edited than Graphic Arts categories. (Music falls somewhere in the middle, would be my impression.)

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I think you are very wrong. I didn't "expect" anything. I'm not trying to treat DMOZ like a service, and I understand that it is run by volunteers. However, I have been trying to submit my site for at least two years now. Please don't assume what I'm thinking or "expecting" from DMOZ. All I'm "expecting" is to better understand the process and to learn how to work with it.

As for your last paragraph: I don't see how this explains my current situation with DMOZ. Thanks.

spectregunner said:

Any advice we offered would be a form of a status report.

By the rules of the forum, we cannot tell you if your submissions have been declined or are still waiting.

You might want to look at our FAQ and get a solid understanding of the wait times that are often encountered.

I'm sorry that this is probably not the answer you hoped for, but it is probably the only real answer we can give.

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Thanks. I will take another look at the FAQ. I hope at least that there is an editor working on the category I last submitted to (Fantasy Artists with last name starting with "S".) If I don't hear/see anything in a long time I suppose I'll reread the FAQ again and try to resubmit.

As for the person who said that DMOZ isn't made up of art critics, glad to hear it! It means that it's not totally hopeless for me .

No, no, no -- we aren't literature "critics" either, if it comes to that. It really doesn't matter how bad your art is. What matters is that you took the trouble to post it on the web, not that it frightened small children and horrified their parents, or frightened the parents and amused the children, or whatever!

I wish we had more art reviewers -- but, face it, I'm not going to be one of them. Words, symbols, music, fine: but the artistic genes in my family went elsewhere.