It has been over 2 years and my site is still not listed

Hello, first I would like to thank the editor staff and webmasters of this site for giving us an opportunity to display our sites in your directory. The reason I have signed up with this forum is since I have submitted my site www.funender.com for over 2 years now and it has never been listed in the dmoz directory. There is no illegal content or any other type of violation, and was curious to know if there was a specific reason as to why my site has never been listed in the directory? Basically funender.com promotes independent artists who wish to share their copyrighted music that they have created online for free, and I would like to make it easier for other Artists to find my site and use all of the free promo tools that funender.com offers. I am working very hard to offer more for artists and being listed in the appropiate directory of dmoz would be beneficial to Indies.

Thanks for your time and services.

Thank you for your inquiry.

Unfortunately what you ask falls under the category of a status check, and we no longer provide site specific information as to why a site is or is not listed.

A quick tour through the archives will quickly demonstrate why we do not offer the service.

What I can offer you is a glimmer of hope. I haven't checked for your site, but in a good number of categories the wait time is in excess of three years for an editor to review a submission request.

Thanks a lot for the quick reply, I understand why it would be a hassle to provide info on why sites are rejected. I will just have to keep hoping that my site will one day be included into dmoz then

http://www.whois.sc/funender.com

I see one link to it, though apparently not one you care about.

Yes that is what I found a bit funny, how someone who I host on my site managed to get their music page listed on dmoz, but I never was able to get my site listed heh

Think of it as random: on many levels it is pretty close.

And that is a good thing overall ... or at least, it's better than anyone could design in finite time.

Ok thanks for the responses

On a mostly unrelated note, I would find it interesting to see some statistics about dmoz. That in itself would probably go a long way to show submitters why waiting 3 or more years is not unrealistic.

Nothing that would take a long while to dig out, but a summary of sites submitted/# of editors/Avg. # of submissions reviewed per month would be an interesting comparison. Although I am sure that is just one half the issue, as editors also monitor categories and sweep them up from time to time. Still, that would be interesting to see.

I have heard tell of a growth in the ODP of around 2,000 listings per month. So the number of new sites appearing would be quite a bit more than that, considering the number of dead sites that get delisted. Those, in turn, would be less than the actual number of sites reviewed (some of which didn't result in a listing). Also, editors will find sites to list from many other sources than the area awaiting review.

I haven't seen any statistics about the other items you mention.

Number of editors is deceptive, because not all editors are active, while some are extremely active. The ODP requires one edit every three months to prevent the account timing out (even after that, though, accounts can get reactivated)

As for submissions - the issue with that is the number of submissions that we call "Directory spam" - multiple submissions to multiple categories of the same site, or single pages from the same site spread all over.

And your other comment is dead-on - editors are monitoring categories, mentoring other editors, other quality control activities, building-out the structure of the categories... it's definitely a lot more than just site reviews, for sure.

The number of editors really isn't to the point: I'm sure there is some hidden assumption there (some theory that makes it relevant), but I can't figure out what it is. There are a handful of editors that are seemingly "full-time" by normal business standards, hundreds that log in on any particular day, and several thousand that are "active" (depending on your definition of active.) It's your usual inverse logarithmic curve, of course. But the "backlog" would be exactly the same if it were one super-robot reviewing 8000 sites a day, or 56000 editors each reviewing one site a week.

But the other numbers are problematic. We don't track number of submittals processed -- it's about the same as the number of submittals added (because the total number of submittals stays in the .5-1M range). But that has nothing to do with the number of sites reviewed, since many unsubmitted sites are considered (and not listed); also, many submittals are obviously spam (and not seriously considered.) Common-sense triage means that of unsubmitted sites, the best should be reviewed first; while of submitted sites, it's more efficient to handle the obvious spam first. And the longer a site waits for a review, the longer it's likely to wait more for a review.

All of which doesn't have any obvious closed-form solution, and giving numbers to someone who thinks there IS a closed-form solution is a cruel, cynical kind of deception in itself.

One number is obvious enough -- the average category gets updated (at most) once every six to twelve months. We don't know whether there are any "average" categories, but that should at least suggest what kind of expectation for time-from-submittal-to-review would be reasonable. (If it will be, on average, 6 months from the submittal date till the next time the category is CHANGED, then obviously it's brain-dead and insane to expect a site to be listed in an average of LESS than 6 months! And you can't even get a statistical handle on how much longer it would have to be, unless you know the percentage of spam submittals in that category. But perhaps that percentage you could get from Googling research.

Funender.com said:

Hello, first I would like to thank the editor staff and webmasters of this site for giving us an opportunity to display our sites in your directory. The reason I have signed up with this forum is since I have submitted my site www.funender.com for over 2 years now and it has never been listed in the dmoz directory. There is no illegal content or any other type of violation, and was curious to know if there was a specific reason as to why my site has never been listed in the directory? Basically funender.com promotes independent artists who wish to share their copyrighted music that they have created online for free, and I would like to make it easier for other Artists to find my site and use all of the free promo tools that funender.com offers. I am working very hard to offer more for artists and being listed in the appropiate directory of dmoz would be beneficial to Indies.

Thanks for your time and services.

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I understand the problem; we are a supplier of teddy bears (worldwide) & also the teddy bear museum of Ireland; the site also contains the history of bear manufacturing.
We have submitted our site several times over the last two years & it does not appear even though it is a good site & would be of benefit to the OPEN DIRECTORY.
Perhaps one or two of the editors have ulterior motives in what is and isn't included but the Directory project as a whole is a really good thing.
Hopefully in time these issues will be resolved; in the meantime all we can do is resubmit & hope that good informative sites are eventually included.

"One or two" editors can't block a site, so there probably is no issue to be resolved.

What is more likely to be going on is ... editors are working on other categories at the moment. Any one category may sit (most categories DO sit) for months at at time without any visible changes. But thousands of edits are done daily "on the whole."

bright illusive butterfly called listing in DMOZ

Thank you for the response.

We'll keep trying to post our site; http://www.tedseclecticlot.com particular from the point of view of the teddy bear museum & history of bear manufacturing in Eire.

We appreciate that the editors are inundated with sites. We have applied to help (as a category editor) but have been rejected.

Our best wishes to all in the DMOZ community.

We'll keep trying to post our site

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Please stop it.

Submitting once to the one best category is enough. If it hasn't been listed after say six months, by all means submit just once more to overcome the possibility that the original submission got lost in the aether. That's it. More than that is simply a waste of your time and what's worse, ours. This can be counter-productive.

If your site is listable, we'll list it in time.
If it isn't, we won't.

In the meantime, you might like to reread our submission guidelines. These are the ones you acknowledged you'd read and agreed every time you submitted the site.

Added You perhaps aren't aware that it's already listed within Trim. I can't imagine why, because there's no prominent address on the website that I can find. You may want to rectify that before somebody notices and removes it.

We'll keep trying to post our site

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Why would you do that? A new submission overwrites an old submission and if the editor approaches the pool of sites in date submitted order you will keep sending yourself to the back. Once received a site remains available for review until an editor gets to it. It is quite possible you are a victim of your own repeated actions.

We have applied to help (as a category editor) but have been rejected.

Click to expand...

Stop thinking like you need to get as many keywords as you can into an obscure forum post or two on the offchance it might boost your Google search results. Five "bears" in 2 sentences. Remember superfluous repetition, i.e. keyword stuffing, in descriptions is against guidelines. If you want to be an editor leave everything you know about SEO techniques at home. ["We"? Editor accounts are personal - sounds like you are applying as a business! That would be a big no-no.]

Im just wondering, Is there any way of telling if the editor of your catagory is active or just logs on every 3 monts to stay an editor?

The short answer is : No.
I advice reading the FAQ for more detailed information.

The concept "THE editor of your category" is alien to the ODP. It's much better to think of there as being no such thing. There are many editors who CAN work in your category. Some of them are very active, some of them aren't. Some of them are very interested in that topic, some of them aren't (and so tend to be active, when they are active, elsewhere).

And a pattern of "continuous activity" is pretty unusual in the ODP -- if you're trying to understand editing activity that way, you're sure to remain forever very confused. Editors edit in bursts; editors edit in one area for awhile, then switch focus to another; all without issuing pre-warnings to anyone -- not ODP administrators, nor other editors, and certainly not the relatively small gangs of spammers that provide most submittals, so (perforce) not the world at large. So the information you're seeking (about what WILL happen tomorrow) can't be available no matter how you ask it.

Hell, I don't even know what I will be doing tomorrow...

...of course I know that there is a lot of work to do if you want to hold a directory clean.

I noticed on boards that sometimes new submissions are listed in the first three month... the kind of content can't be the reason. I'm waiting to get listed with a site offering worthy Open source content about more then a year. I think its just having luck...

...its funny while waiting to get listed here you get so much links to your site that it looks not so important to get listed...

edit: in the last year there are 8 reviews of my site by dmoz editors....I see you guys are busy...