Is this an editor power trip?

What Mr Rat says is key - it all depends on what the site appears to have as its purpose, in the eye of the (impartial) beholder - in this case the reviewing editor.

If it is there to impart information and has some ads (which help support the site) then no problem. If the site appears to exist solely to drive surfers to the ads, then it is not regarded as having the type of content that we want to list in the ODP.

We can appreciate how not having hard-and-fast, objective rules is a highly frustrating issue to webmasters. The ODP editors see it as an advantage however, and we feel that we are building a better directory because of it. If we had those rules, we might have sites which deserve a listing which we are not allowed to add, and ones which definitely don't which we would rather trash, but are forced to add.

Yes, some things will depend on editor judgement. For example, sites under construction are not supposed to be submitted. Now clearly if the first page of the site says under construction, and there is no other content, it does not get in. BUt what if it has 100 pages of good content, and one page says under construction - I would publish it.

But what if it has 10 pages, and one under construction - truly there is no way to put a hard and fast rule - it really is going to depend on the actual site and the content - and has to be an editor judgement - and not all editors will come to the same conclusion.

I had a site recently that was borderline on this issue - several pages of the site were under construction - and might have got in, except that the working pages only worked in Internet Explorer, and in other browsers was pretty useless. But another editor who only used Internet Explorer might have accepted it. In that case, I did something I rarely do and I sent a message to the webmaster, telling him that his HTML code was totally wrong, and how to fix it to get accepted.

So any site that falls into a grey area of the rules runs the risks of doing that.

Nicole said:

However I must say that I am appalled at how some of the editors respond to webmasters.

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You're correct Nicole.

Some people get carried away with a *little* bit of control.

hutcheson said:

You can apply this test yourself. It's very simple. If you wouldn't have created the site had it not been for the anticipated advertising income from it, then ... when you submit it to the ODP, you know you're spamming. And this is whether or not the site has even a single affiliate link.

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Lots of people create sites to make money, nothing wrong with that. What are you saying, that ODP should only carry non-profit and personal sites?

Amazon exists purely to make money, so to does Ebay.

Fair enough if a site is just full of affiliate links, no value there, but you can't rule out a site that aims to, and fully intends to, make money by providing a service of value.

"make money by providing a service of value" is not equal to anticipated advertising income
:tree:

gimmster said:

"make money by providing a service of value" is not equal to anticipated advertising income
:tree:

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How do you work that one out?

Google makes money on advertising income. I presume they "anticipated" this at some point.

Oh please, do not try to split hairs on us. I am not as reserved as my fellow editors and tend to tell it like it is.

It is simple. Pull the affiliate links off the site. Look at the content. If the content leads to the affiliate links then you have nothing. If after the affiliate links are gone there is no content you have nothing. If the content after the affiliate links are removed can be found on another site nothing again. It is called unique content. This does not make the sites bad. Hell, maybe the surfer has not seen the stuff yet. That is just fine but rest assured the editor has. It just makes the site unlistable in dmoz.org.

Why you ask? Because that is the way we do things. It is laid out in the guidelines - for everyone to see. We preach this to everyone who ever asks about it in these forums. It is not a secret. You might not like it but it is the way it is. Search the forums - we tell everyone this. It is not something new.

Are we misleading you, imho no? Do you agree with this policy - does not matter because you don't set it. Neither do we. It is laid out by STAFF. When it comes down to it STAFF has the final word - and I for one agree with STAFF.

Have a Great Day and Flame Away. I have on my Flame retardent suit so you can have fun all day

Peace!

p.s. I probably will get a knock by the metas for posting this but I have been on forums too long to let trolls have the last word - and I do not have the power to lock this thread.

This isn't rocket science here. If I create a site full of original essays about 18th century literature and put some Amazon affiliate links at the bottom of each page, the original content (the literature essays) were obviously the primary point of the site. If I create a site to sell my handmade crocheted shawls and plop some ads on the top of the page, the original content (the shawl sales) were obviously the primary point of the site. If I make a faux directory page with six affiliate links to online clothing boutiques, a row of Google ads, and a paragraph of keyword stuffed description of ladies fashion trends, the primary point of the site is obviously to make money by catching traffic and driving it to the advertised sites.

There are grey areas, but honestly, not very many. Sites like the first and second examples up there will add value to our directory by providing our users with original material no other website out there offers. Hurrah! Sites like the third would waste our users' time by redirecting them to the same old sites they could have just reached from our directory in the first place with one fewer click. Boo! Hiss!

Hi - I said that I wasn't going to add more to this discussion but just wanted to ask one more question ( promise I shall stop after this) after I saw a comment by thehelper. You said :"If the content after the affiliate links are removed can be found on another site nothing again".
By that statement do you mean if the content can be found on another site listed with the Open Directory or do you mean if the content can be found elsewhere on the web or on the merchant site that they are being referred to?
If it is the former would that mean that if 2 sites provided roughly the same sort of info but from a different view point, then your would only allow one of them into the Open Directory? If it is the latter how would you check that out - it could take forever?

Nicole, that is a good question. Normally when I find sites that are sharing content I find more than just one. As a matter of fact I have never found just one. In other words, I have never had to make the decision of who is robbing who. If I did I would probably take it up in the internal private editor only forums and go with the consensus.

We do not edit in a vacuum. We have resources - mostly hundreds of other editors who have quality opinions and excellent research skills.

Nicole said:

You said :"If the content after the affiliate links are removed can be found on another site nothing again".

By that statement do you mean if the content can be found on another site listed with the Open Directory or do you mean if the content can be found elsewhere on the web or on the merchant site that they are being referred to?

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Yes, obviously the merchant site is the authoritative source of information on the subject of that merchant, and if we can identify it, then that's obviously the only one the surfer ever needs.

The answer to the second part is yes also, although it's not quite so obvious. That would be something like vstore (which by their sustained distributed-spam-attack on us several years ago, had quite a bit to do with shaping our guidelines) you have deliberate hiding of the actual merchant site. In that case, the authoritative site doesn't fulfill the shopping requirement, and the affiliates don't fulfill the authoritativeness requirements: and so we don't list any one of them. [The submittal policies talk about this, too: the bit about "not submitting related sites", and look at the penalty for violating it.]

Nicole said:

If it is the former would that mean that if 2 sites provided roughly the same sort of info but from a different view point, then your would only allow one of them into the Open Directory? If it is the latter how would you check that out - it could take forever?

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In politics, science, and religion (and health, which represents an intersection of the three) there are obviously multiple viewpoints that we list, and the issue of authoritativeness is very complex. In an e-commerce business there's by definition only one viewpoint, and that's of the person who defines the terms under which goods and services are provided -- any other viewpoint isn't "authoritatively proffering".

But even in Health and Religion, we would look seriously askance at multiple sites expressing the same viewpoint -- we call them "spam" there also.

We shall not, however, discuss exactly what techniques we use to spot duplicate content, or how we decide when to use which techniques. There is very little information that would be more valuable to spammers: in any case, we do not obligate ourselves to always use (or continue to use) the same techniques. We use what works.

The ODP slogan is "humans do it better", not "humans do it perfectly". There's a proverb in the open-source programming community: "Given enough eyes, all bugs are trivial." Our highest priority is fixing problems reported by the public: and I believe that almost any comparision of the ODP with any other directory will show how much difference that makes.

hutcheson said:

If it is the latter how would you check that out - it could take forever?

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This is true. And this gets to the heart of why editors so passionately hate affiliate doorway sites. We signed on to index the web, not to winkle out copycats. And copycat-winkling takes up the majority of our editing time, and adds nothing to the directory. You'll see how often people complain that such-and-such a category hasn't been "edited" (they mean "changed") since MBIIa; usually the fact is that some editor has spent hours removing blatant doorway spam, more hours spotting subtle doorway spam -- and then didn't list the other sites because he didn't want to be responsible for adding VERY subtle doorway spam. As nearly as I can figure out, there would be an average submittal-to-listing time in the ODP of 1-2 WEEKS if we weren't inundated by spam. That is an enormous tax the doorway-spamming-Vandals place on all honest, legitimate business websites!

And again, we hate that we're not able to provide the service we'd like to give, because the doorway-spammers of the net have coordinated this massive distributed denial-of-service attack on us.

Even Google are taking the same view of such sites: I see.

We shall not, however, discuss exactly what techniques we use to spot duplicate content

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Actually, in many cases it isn't even a "technique" - it is pure and simple familiarity with a topic. Many editors only have to browse a couple pages to know exactly what combination of sources the information was compiled from. Many webmasters seem to think that unique means rewording stuff they find on the internet. It doesn't. Users may not be able to tell the difference between a travel directory that regurgitates information compiled from several governmental sources and one containing articles written by someone with actual knowledge of an area, but I can.

lissa said:

Many editors only have to browse a couple pages to know exactly what combination of sources the information was compiled from. Many webmasters seem to think that unique means rewording stuff they find on the internet. It doesn't.

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Lissa, maybe you can but others can not. My site was rejected because it had "no unique content" yet I wrote it entirely from my OWN personal experience and my OWN knowledge plus I have had numerous people from all walks of life tell me how useful and informative my site is. Strange that isn't it?

I think lissa was talking in more general terms rather than in just your case. I really rather doubt she was talking specifically about you as we are prevented by the forum guidelines from going into that much detail on specific cases. Alot of times we tend to post generally on these threads because we know many more people tend to read them besides just the people that posted them - and alot of these types of comments are meant for them - rather than you. Food for thought - thehelper looking at the big picture of things for a second.... ok back to my narrow track

Hi thehelper and in fact you have been pretty helpful all along so thanks. I know that Lissa was not referring to me but I just wanted to make a point. I think that this whole thread is not really going anywhere any more and as I started it I would like to finish it with a global overview of what I was trying to say/acheive in the first place.
This forum in general seems to be dominated by disgruntled people - webmasters and editors alike. Maybe as there are a lot of unhappy people it is time to take stock and see why. I know that noone or nothing is infalible but that does not mean that we can't get anything right and that things can not be changed. The DMOZ policies will never please everyone and why should they. You (the editors) have a job to do and an extremely hard one at that and I agree that there will always be people who try to milk the system, any system in fact, for their own personal gains. We (the general public) can rant and rave and make suggestions but only you can implement the changes. Listen to what people are saying. They are making suggestions to try and improve things, not to be nasty or trouble makers. Maybe the sumbmission guidelines are not clear enough, maybe certain editors get too carried away with their position and their use of adjectives, maybe certain webmasters are trying to get away with whatever they can.... I don't know but what I do know is that the DMOZ should listen to what people are saying in the forums. Their suggestions are not always valid or possible but that is no need to be on the defensive all the time. It seems to be a case of you against us rather than constructive and helpful dialogue. Be fair, be honest and be transparent and people will respond accordingly.

"Nicole" said:

I don't know but what I do know is that the DMOZ should listen to what people are saying in the forums. Their suggestions are not always valid or possible but that is no need to be on the defensive all the time. It seems to be a case of you against us rather than constructive and helpful dialogue. Be fair, be honest and be transparent and people will respond accordingly.

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Thanks for the summing up. It might not always be evident, but we try to listen (and I think we actually do). From time to time, an interesting suggestion *that can be implemented* is made and we follow it. Unfortunately, it's not very often. That's not because people are stupid, or because we couldn't care less about outside opinions, but because the project is now nearly six years old and has got contributions from more than 60,000 editors (of which the vast majority is not active anymore, though). It means that there is a high probability that when a member here thinks of something, it's already been put forward and considered (the internal forums are quite active and suggestions for the improvement of the directory are made there all the time).