Re: I've been waiting about 9 mos to get listed. E
It is, more or less, as hutcheson described. The editors have very few rules about what they can and can't work on ("one edit every four months" is the minimum
, and there's no one telling people they have to work on a certain category, or even to look at unreviewed at all). As a result, no one can predict what is expected, or reasonable for a given category. I edit in some spammy, backlogged categories where I've looked at submissions from 2000 and 2001
and in others where it's unusual to see anything more than a couple weeks old that an editor hasn't listed, deleted, or commented on.
We're working really hard to improve this directory, and from what I observe in the ODP forum and what I see clicking through logs, I'm amazed at how much we are getting done.
There's so much more that needs to get done besides reviewing submissions. For some editors, unreviewed is a huge priority. Others focus on hunting down abuse or cleaning up existing listings. And everyone needs some variety.
I'm hoping you can see why we might be frustrated with your question. And it's not just because we've heard the question and given our answer a hundred times before, but because we're looking at this project (!) in very different ways. Submitters are frustrated that we haven't found time to make the directory better and more complete by incorporating their suggestion. And that's
at best -- it's just as often that they ask for promises, accountability, or a level of service guarantee as
the owner of a site, not a user of the web, which isn't part of our
contract. Quicker reviews of submissions is something many of us (editors) would love to offer, but we don't consider this project or our contribution a failure if it doesn't. I personally, would love for the median time-to-listing-or-deletion to be, say, a month. And maybe it'll happen someday. But my motivation to become an editor was to improve some categories -- to get some old crap out, and mostly to track down a some of the great stuff hiding out there and make it not-quite-so-hard-to-find. It of course wasn't until I got here that I discovered this massive concept of "unreviewed".
So yeah, a site owner, they want their site listed; someone browsing the web wants the useful, content-rich, relevant sites listed. We do what we can to do the second, and try to do the first in the process, but it's almost incidental rather than central to the process.
I've no idea where that came from, or why I'd want to write a 429-word post. I hope it means something to you. I'm happy that I'm free, as an editor, to choose to spend a half hour writing a post to a, what, SEO-type person without there being a supervisor to scold me for not making enough editing throughput tonight, on account of having wasted time on some little post in some little thread. I'm glad that I get to offer a chunk of time to the ODP this evening to rearrange a few listed sites, discuss a reorganization proposal, trash some spammy submissions, fill out a new category application, read some posts in the editor forum, and post a nice long response in the public forum.
Quite honestly (and even though I'm sure someone faster must have responded by now) I think it made my day.
