my catagory hasn't been updated in over 2 years

I have no idea what to do. My catagory:
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Oregon/Business_and_Economy/Real_Estate
Doesn't have an editor and never has. Neither does the catagory below that.

The catagory below that:
http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Oregon/
only has one editor who hasn't added or edited a site in over two years according to alexa. I tried emailing her but her email is now invalid.

I'm starting to realize that posting in a proper catagory in dmoz is a lost cause. I don't know if a submition eventually works its way down the editors over time, but the time involved in dropping three or more subcatagories could take years even if the system was setup that way. If it's not then the chances of a meta editor coming to my catagory is once in a lifetime.

It's very important to me to have my site listed in dmoz and under the correct catagory, but I'm fustrated. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should do?

Hello,

I would recommend reading the following FAQ:

http://resource-zone.com/forum/faq.php?faq=odp#faq_no_editor

So basically your saying in a nice way that I'm stuck.
If I'm lucky I have a chance on average about once every two years to get my site listed, and since the editors below it haven't changed in over 3 years and they are becoming less and less active as it seems. I could wait up to four years before my site is even considered. By then my website could have spider webs on it.

Thanks for the quick reply,
Eli

(a) [nitpick] http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Oregon/ is not below http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Oregon/Business_and_Economy/Real_Estate

(b) Alexa is not a good judge (or a judge at all, for that matter) of how much editing an editor has done. The top Oregon category has not been edited in 2 years because very few sites belong at that level -- they'd belong in one of the subcategories. The "last edited" date on a category (which is all that Alexa looks at) only applies to that category, not any editing done in any of its subcategories.

(c) Few editors will answer an email from a submitter so the fact that your email didn't get through really isn't critical.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should do?

Click to expand...

Your only option is to wait until someone gets around to reviewing the site.

No, you're not "stuck." At the very worst, you can't possibly be worse off than if the ODP had never existed. And there's no way on earth that the mere existance of the ODP (with or without your site, with or without an editor for your category) can "stick" you.

This isn't the place to discuss the status of your site--the other thread addresses that. I can tell you that the reason the category hasn't been updated in two years is that ... there really are very very few sites that are listable there. Real estate agents/agencies get listed in their home town, in their home county (only if they have offices in multiple towns in a county), or in the state category ONLY IF THEY HAVE OFFICES IN MULTIPLE COUNTIES.

Editors have gone through the sites suggested there, and I can tell you that there is, in our judgment, not a single suggested site is presumptively eligible for listing there -- every single site submitted there is either (1) listed, (2) rejected for being too content-free for listing anywhere, or (3) moved to some other site that on a quick perusal looked closer to being more appropriate. Of course, more careful analysis of some of the sites (as part of a fuller site review for actual listing) may reveal that some of those sites do represent businesses with offices in multiple counties -- and so eventually some of those sites may end up being listed here after all.

But at this point, your concern that the category has no editor has no basis. Your site could not possibly be closer to being reviewed if that category had two hundred editors, because no sites are waiting there for review anyway.

thats odd. I submitted my site http://www.RealtyInOregon.com there quite awhile ago. Which is dedicated to solely real estate in Oregon. It's a very relavent site with good content and no commercial affiliations. So it couldn't have been rejected, and i did a status check on it about 3 weeks ago and they said it was in that catagory pending approval. Perhaps you were looking at the wrong catagory?

Try http://dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/Oregon/Business_and_Economy/Real_Estate/

Thanks for your response though,
Eli

Thus much for the category. I mention it because this is an example of the work that goes on behind the scenes, completely invisible to the public -- in this case, hundreds of pre-reviews or reviews of sites, and not a single listing to show for it. A typical experienced editor might do 7 or 8 edits for each site they actually add.

So it is easy to jump to conclusions about the amount of work done here or there. But when it comes down to it, there are really only two questions:

(1) Is there more work that could be done in this category? -- to which the answer is nearly always "yes..."
(2) Do I care enough to commit to doing some of it, as well as I can, and as fairly as I'd expect someone else to? -- which is harder to answer honestly, because if the answer is "no", then there is an obvious next question, "if it matters so little to me, then why should anyone else bother?"

Your site can be discussed in the other thread, according to the usual rules.

Well there's a lot of people who really appreciate the work that gets done by the editors. Facts be faced, a listing in dmoz could make or break an online business. For instance would you hire an SEO company that doesn't even have their site in the search engines? Even for the ones who are in the search engines placement is very important and since Google uses dmoz for it's directory as well as many other directory sites that pull directly from dmoz. Link popularity is a huge ordeal even in itself and dmoz is the easiest way to guarantee hundreds of sites linking to you. So you really shouldn't jump to the conclusion that we don't appreciate the work being done just because we don't see the majority of it. The fact is us smaller players in the business rely heavily on the work being done by the active ODP editors and we naturally panic when our site doesn't get any attention. So the preasure is naturally going to be placed on you to keep everybody happy.

In my humble opinion, just do the best you can and remember that your a volunteer so you might as well have fun with it.

-Eli

A business depending on a dmoz.org listing should not be in business.

I probably should not keep this thread alive by commenting but I just can't let this one go by ...

For instance would you hire an SEO company that doesn't even have their site in the search engines?

Click to expand...

No, I would not hire them but I would not hire or use a service that does not provide full contact details on their sites either, would you? In fact, if I had my way (which is not the case) no site that provides a service or sells a product would get listed without full contact details. But that is just my bias and can not interfere with my editing in the ODP, though it will cause me to spend more time investigating a site that doesn't have contact info. I'm sure I'm not alone.

>Facts be faced, a listing in dmoz could make or break an online business.

No, that is simply not true at all, and anyone who tells you that is just prevaricating to avoid the responsibility for his own total lack of busy-ness. There are millions of sites that are in the business of promoting other sites. There are tens of thousands of online businesses that broke even with an ODP listing; there are thousands more that are still making even without an ODP listing.

Check out some of the webmaster forums. The successful ones will tell you something completely different.

?

I don't like to complain but how long does it actually take to look at a site? I mean I can determine if a site is good or not in just a few seconds. I guess there's more to it than that or maybe you just have a lot of sites to review? tell me, why is dmoz so slow?

The time to actually review any given site usually ranges from a few minutes to much, much longer. However, there isn't only one site waiting to be reviewed, not everyone wants to or is able to edit in the category that any given site is waiting for review in, and reviewing sites is not the only thing that editors do.

If you want to know more, have a look through the other threads in this forum as many people have brought up the same question and it's been answered many times.

No, you can determine if a site is useful to you at a particular moment in time in a few seconds. You cannot tell if it has useful unique information, is placed in the best possible category, has content so extensive it should be deeplinked, is kid safe, is Adult in nature, is a mirror of another site, is a doorway to another site, actually has real content hidden amongst the affiliate links, is primarily designed to drive traffic to another site, has actually illegal content (as communicated to editors by AOL legal), digest the content of said site, and write an unbiased description of the site. All that takes time. Some sites may take 5 minutes, some may take several hours (yes each).

Dmoz is not slow, the fact that it does not meet your demands is neither here nor there. I listed sites today that were suggested today, I didn't list some sites that have been waiting months. I don't tell you which section of your web site to work on on a particular day, no-one has the right to tell editors that either.

Big picture - a net increase of circa 1000 sites a day is achieved, after factoring in removal of dead/hijacked/or no longer appropriate sites.
Small picture - an individual sites chances of being one of that 1000 is not an issue to us.

:tree:

There is more to it than that. If by "good" you mean, pleasingly laid out and having several functional links off the home page, sure -- a few seconds will do it.

If by "good" you mean, the layout still looks pleasing if the screen or font size differs from the webdeveloper's machine (which is what "good layout" means to my eyes) -- then the problem doesn't arise, because there are so few good sites it's not worth the trouble of checking for them. We list those other sites anyway.

If by good you're an ODP editor and mean "unique content" -- then obviously it depends on what kind of topic it is. How long does it take to recognize that yet another vacation accommodation directory has nothing unique? (The answer here is simple: if we haven't found something obviously unique and valuable in 59 cold seconds, we've got better things to do than look further.)

How long does it take to check a gift shop? (It depends on how long it takes the editor to spot yet another vstore/SMC/whatever-alias-the-spamming-jerks-are-hiding-behind-this-week dropshipped item. And that may be awhile. And ... is it worth it for more than two people on earth? The answer is very seldom "yes."

Businesses with a brick-and-mortar place-of-business are generally not too hard. Personal service proprietors who may not have a place of business at all, are very very hard.

Online businesses are an especially large problem. There are thousands of businesses that are advertised to "make money for you while you sleep" -- and none of them are listable. Any editall can point to dozens of categories where he can do hundreds or thousands of site reviews without actually having to add an actual site.

I think the appropriate summary is: submitted sites are processed very efficiently. (We could perhaps use a bit more technical support for rejecting sites.) Strip-mined sites are processed very efficiently. Googled sites are not processed as efficiently as I would like -- we could use a great deal of help there.

As for priorities, I think the editing community has shown a most impressive ability to focus on areas where work can be done most efficiently, and to identify areas where work can't be done efficiently because of systematic or taxonomic issues. And the fact is, there's a strong correlation between "where we can work efficiently" and "what's important by our standards." The value to the global economy of one more classified-ads or travel-directory site on earth is negative -- and editors show commendable reluctance to waste time reviewing those sites. But no directory on earth can come close to matching the ODP's across-the-board ability to ferret out information on specialty topics -- the hundreds of thousands of categories with a dozen sites, but for which there is no comparable category in any other directory. This is our main mission, and our main glory.

gimmster said:

I listed sites today that were suggested today, I didn't list some sites that have been waiting months. I don't tell you which section of your web site to work on on a particular day, no-one has the right to tell editors that either.

Click to expand...

...and today I listed some sites that weren't even suggested. You know editors are often pretty competitive, they're motivated by numbers a lot of the time. But strangely enough they'd rather find sites out there than trawling through the suggestions. I think I'm right in saying that editors receive an equal "score" for a site they found themselves to a site they added from the submissions list. You'd expect that the list of unreviewed, or a category that "hasn't been updated in over two years" would be consided "low hanging fruit". But no. Go figure?

Where work needs doing it will get done. Some categories are deluged and some might be quieter than others but none will really be neglected. The process for inducting new editors naturally favours the outer branches and every good editor will tend to each and every subcategory under the main categories he/she is responsible for.

That's also because the number of days/ months/ years a site has been waiting in the review pile is a totally artificial measure of the importance of the site.

Somehow people have got the idea that it is more important to review a site that has been waiting for two years than a site that was submiited yesterday.

It is not -- the only way to measure the relative importance of two sites to to look at them side by side.

And as stated, there are many hundreds of thousands of sites that have never been submitted/suggested, and many of thise may be more important for a category than any site that was submitted.

There is no real advantage to reviewing sites in date of submission, than to review sites in a random order.

How about getting more editors in the smaller catagories instead of piling everyone into the large catagories

Editors volunteer, they are not assigned.

How about getting more editors in the smaller catagories instead of piling everyone into the large catagories

Click to expand...

As editors gain more experience they earn additional categories. Often the additional categoreis they earn are higher up the the tree.

When this happens, the editor is allowed to edit any categories directly below them. Editors often take their names off of the smaller categoreis for two reasons:

1. The main screen they work from gets too crowded if it lists every single category where an editor can edit
2. since newer editors can only edit in the smaller categories, having another eidtor's name there may discourage applications.

Here is an example of permission that I posted in a differnt forum:

Here is a category tree:

Foo (Editor Joe)

Foo/Bar (NNE -- no named editor)
Foo/OnYou (Editor Mary)

Foo/Bar/Royal (Editor Stan)
Foo/Bar/Royal/Screwup (NNE)

Foo/OnYou/Too (NNE)
Foo/OnYou /Twee (NNE)

Foo/OnYou/Too/Bucko (Editor Alice)


Now, let's review the bidding.

Fairly new editor Alice can only edit in Foo/OnYou/Too/Bucko

Editor Mary can edit in Foo/OnYou, Foo/OnYou/Too, Foo/OnYou/Twee and Foo/OnYou/Too/Bucko

Editor Stan can edit in Foo/Bar/Royal and Foo/Bar/Royal/Screwup

Editor Joe can edit in all of the categories shown

Any Editall or Meta editor (200+ individuals) can edit in all of the categories in the direrctory (all 590,000+)


Hope this helps.