New Submission Method

Crooner · Apr 4, 2004

xixtas01 said:
The suggestion on the table is: A better validation script for submissions.

That's something that I can understand might be desireable based on your past experience, crooner. However, your experience is not typical. I personally have rejected many submissions and not ever one yet because the of the title or description submitted.

I've rejected several desciption updates because they weren't guidelines compliant. But none of these situations would have likely been filtered out by a script, no matter how baroque. Okay, maybe if every time the submission included the words "the best" in a description it got rejected that would have taken care of a couple of them, but then it would have been resumbmitted with "the premiere" or "the most wonderful". You see the problem?

If the title or description is bad (and it almost always is) we rewrite it, not reject it. Problem solved without any engineering. If an editor is rejecting sites because the submitted description contains an "&" then I would expect that editor might need a little additional education.

Based on my experience, I would say that this is a very small portion of the lengthy review time issue.

Dear xixtas01

Good comments but how do we "help the blind see" ?

How do you stop people taking up to 2 years to get listed ?

Crooner · Apr 4, 2004

spectregunner said:
Without revealing the identity of the sender (because it serve no purpose), what are the exact contents of the e-mail? I think it might clarify things at this point if we knew exactly what you were told and the context of that advice.

If you are not comfortable doing that in this fora, you can PM any (one) of the editors who have responded to this thread.

Dear Spectregunner,

There were several emails back and forth as the editor kindly gave me his time and benefit of his expertise to help resolve the situation by suggesting slight changes (despite admitting that not one word was factually incorrect) - bingo Ive cracked it !

Result - still waiting till er ---- maybe 2 years who knows !!!

giz · Apr 4, 2004

>> The listing above me had over twice as many (supposedly) keywords. <<

Some older listings are not compliant with today's guidelines. Those are fixed as they are found. New listings have to comply with the current guidelines. This is the only way it can be done when there are 4 million listings to look after.

Last week, I found a Dutch language site residing in a category for only English language sites. It had been there since 1999, and over-looked. This was wrongly listed. I bounced it over to the right place for re-listing. In the meantime all the foreign language stuff that had already been submitted in the last few years, and not yet reviewed, had been passed to the appropriate place within months of being submitted (the submitter could have put it directly in the right place if they had read and followed the guidelines).

Crooner · Apr 4, 2004

RobertParker said:
I don't employ any scripts to help with submission reviews. The idea of ODP is to have humans do it.

I guess all ODP editors have slightly different approaches and ways of reviewing submissions - but if you submit a description according to the guidelines, you should have no problem - and no need for us to use scripts.

Dear Robert,
There is a problem that there must be a better way to help people understand.

Some form of instant rejection with WHY is needed.

Between 13 minutes and 2 years to get listed is a ludicrous situation.

Many people are trying their best and are having problems.

donaldb · Apr 4, 2004

Unfortunately you're looking at the ODP as a service where editors are sitting around waiting for submissions to review. That is not the case. We are not providing a service to web site owners. We call the submission process "Suggest URL" for a reason. We are hoping that people will help us build the directory by suggesting URLs to add, but that is often not our only source for quality URLs. Nowhere in our guidelines or mandate do we state that we will be listing your suggestions within a specific amount of time. It's just not what we're about. We're building a directory, we're not an assembly line of web site reviewers

Crooner · Apr 4, 2004

giz said:
>> The listing above me had over twice as many (supposedly) keywords. <<

Some older listings are not compliant with today's guidelines. Those are fixed as they are found. New listings have to comply with the current guidelines. This is the only way it can be done when there are 4 million listings to look after.

Last week, I found a Dutch language site residing in a category for only English language sites. It had been there since 1999, and over-looked. This was wrongly listed. I bounced it over to the right place for re-listing. In the meantime all the foreign language stuff that had already been submitted in the last few years, and not yet reviewed, had been passed to the appropriate place within months of being submitted (the submitter could have put it directly in the right place if they had read and followed the guidelines).

Dear Giz,

Yet again another example of the point I am trying to make.

Lets get down to absolute basics and whilst not wishing to offend anyone - it is blatently obvious that there is a considerable knowledge gap in the main between the submitters and the editors.

Do you honestly think the guy submitting his site wanted to thrown out - hey why not give him a good kicking as well for being so stupid - he deserves it !

He made an error because there is a problem as I see it - that it is not simple enough to get a listing.(for the record one of my sites was listed very quickly)

It should not be an intellect contest where the dumb are ignored.

If some sort of instant system could be put in place to help the less knowledgeable - odds are they would become more knowledgeable and thus waste less time of the good people giving their time for nothing.

Zeal at least try to address this problem and help the submitter to learn.

Could anyone offer any sensible suggestions on some sort of -
1 Instant rejection
2 Why
3 Help

pvgool · Apr 4, 2004

Could anyone offer any sensible suggestions on some sort of -
1 Instant rejection
2 Why
3 Help

1. We already have a system that filters some of the suggestions
2. Because some people try to trick us in believing we should list their spam
3. All information needed for submitting a site is already available. But most people don't read them. Why? Lazy, Stupid. I don't know.

Crooner · Apr 4, 2004

donaldb said:
Unfortunately you're looking at the ODP as a service where editors are sitting around waiting for submissions to review. That is not the case. We are not providing a service to web site owners. We call the submission process "Suggest URL" for a reason. We are hoping that people will help us build the directory by suggesting URLs to add, but that is often not our only source for quality URLs. Nowhere in our guidelines or mandate do we state that we will be listing your suggestions within a specific amount of time. It's just not what we're about. We're building a directory, we're not an assembly line of web site reviewers

Dear Donald,

I cannot understand the logic in your opening line.

Your other points whilst correct unfortunately do not offer any solution to the problem.

Crooner · Apr 4, 2004

pvgool said:
1. We already have a system that filters some of the suggestions
2. Because some people try to trick us in believing we should list their spam
3. All information needed for submitting a site is already available. But most people don't read them. Why? Lazy, Stupid. I don't know.

Dear pvgool,

You misunderstood (or maybe I was wrong in not making it clear enough !!!)

1 Instant rejection to the submitter.

2 Details to submitter why submission is rejected.

3 Help to submitter on how it should be done.

Try and help that "lazy stupid" submitter to be as good as you - and please bear in mind that he may be a genius in his own field of expertise which has nothing to do with internet technology.

hutcheson · Apr 4, 2004

Crooner said:
other points ... unfortunately do not offer any solution to the problem.

True.

What we are trying to get you to understand is that the situation you describe is not a problem for us, and we do not believe it is a problem for people who are trying to help us.

In fact, for people who are trying to help improve our descriptions by pointing out significant content on the site that would go unsuspected by our surfers, or by pointing out actual errors in the description, we don't WANT to force them through a straitjacket form. We want them free to communicate to us wherein our description is wrong, or how it could be improved! As always, we expect to be writing the actual published description, and so it's not necessary for their suggestions to be grammatical, orthographically normative, or syntactically guidelines-compliant. We don't want to force them to learn our editing guidelines; we want them to provide useful information for us in whatever form is convenient for them.

As nearly as I can tell, the issue you describe will only be a problem for keyword-stuffing spammers who are trying to measure out to the milligram how much stuffing they can pack into one description. My advice to them would be, "the last shall be first, and the first last." I'm very likely to ADD text to a short suggested description, and to SEVERELY curtail a long one. I'll happily recheck a submittal where the webmaster says 'yew ovurluked my own translation of "War and Peace", mon', but I'd delete in a heartbeat one that suggests "the current description is accurate, but my SERP scheme requires you to add more keywords."

So your proposal would hurt people who are trying to help us, and help only people who are trying to hurt us. Which is enough to commend it to many people, but ... not, I think, the Netscape programming staff.

spectregunner · Apr 4, 2004

1 Instant rejection to the submitter. 2 Details to submitter why submission is rejected.

1. That would just open the floodgates to the spammers and directory abusers, who would immediately know that their latest attempt failed, and who would immediately try, try again.

2. For what purpose? We are here to build a directory. Spending time helping submitters fine-tune their sites to make them directory compliant is not what we do.

There are plenty of resources out there, some paid, some not paid, that will perform the consultancy role.

One critical thing that you are omitting is the very real fact that some people flat refuse to see what is wrong with their sites. They deny they have 15 mirrors. They deny they are an affiliate cesspool. They lie about what community they are located in so as to get a lisiting in a larger community. They pretend to build a service directory, hide their identity but have all the link go back to the hotel or real estate agency. The abuse is staggering and, yes, the little guy loses as a result.

bobrat · Apr 4, 2004

To emphasise that point. I discovered - after a little detective work -one site owner, who had managed to get over 10 sites in the directory - but they all were for the same company. After it was reduced to one, I got an email asking why. When I suggested that she had more than one site, she denied it, when I sent her the name of one of the mirrors, she said oh yes, she had forgotton about that, but she only had those two. When confronted with a third, which had the same mailing address - she said she had no knowldege of it, and had no idea who put the site up.

This is not the first time I've encountered this - some site owners must think there are no humans with intelligence working as editors that will seee through hits nonsense. But as common with the criminal mind, they are ever optimistic.

In the end - no script will protect us from lying idiots.

donaldb · Apr 4, 2004

Crooner said:
Dear Donald,

I cannot understand the logic in your opening line.

Your other points whilst correct unfortunately do not offer any solution to the problem.

What's not to understand? I'm not trying to be difficult, but I think that we're coming at this from different perspectives. Do you think that the ODP is like Yahoo! or some other pay for listing type of web directory? We're not. Our reason for being is to build a web directory, but that does not mean that we need the web site owners to submit their sites to us. It's sometimes nice that they do, but usually we will do just fine on our own finding them if they are worth finding. You see submitters as our primary source of URLs, but we don't. We see them as another source, but not the only source. So something that you see as a problem is not really a problem to us

Crooner · Apr 5, 2004

Dear spectregunner, Bobrat & Donaldb,

I think this will be my last post on the subject as editors have made their points and no one else has offered any constructive options.

Sadly it looks like its - 13 minutes or 2 years or nothing - so what ! - thats the way it is.

Thanks to all those who contributed their opinion.

Hey you never know - a few years down the line (when I am retired at Franks in Idaho - still no listing) things may have changed and people will remember this thread - we shall see - good luck.

giz · Apr 5, 2004

Well, another 4000 sites got added to the ODP today. Editors don't see directory growth as a problem. Editors are editing. Sites are being added.

There is a pool of 4 BILLION sites listed in Google that can be tapped into quite easily
.
The 1 MILLION sites in the ODP unreviewed queue are often of lower quality than stuff that can be found in seconds using a search engine to look for new sites to build a category with.

Editors are voluteers, and review whatever they feel like reviewing as and when they have time to do so. There is no-one to impose any sort of workload on the volunteers. So sites are added faster than any other directory on the planet, but no-one can predict which sites, or which categories, or when.

That is how it is.

Crooner · Apr 6, 2004

giz said:
Well, another 4000 sites got added to the ODP today. Editors don't see directory growth as a problem. Editors are editing. Sites are being added.

There is a pool of 4 BILLION sites listed in Google that can be tapped into quite easily
.
The 1 MILLION sites in the ODP unreviewed queue are often of lower quality than stuff that can be found in seconds using a search engine to look for new sites to build a category with.

Editors are voluteers, and review whatever they feel like reviewing as and when they have time to do so. There is no-one to impose any sort of workload on the volunteers. So sites are added faster than any other directory on the planet, but no-one can predict which sites, or which categories, or when.

That is how it is.

Good for you - discrimination is alive and well.

So what - thats the way it is !

Alucard · Apr 6, 2004

You have made your point - you believe that editors are discriminating against certain sites, editors have read and responded to your opinions with their own. It is obvious to me that neither side is going to convince the other of their point of view. Can we please close this discussion?

thehelper · Apr 6, 2004

How is it discrimination? If I am a hobby editor and I like to make model airplanes and I am adding model airplane sites I am discriminating against a Real Estate site because I have no interest in that all? I am supposed to go into a Real Estate category and edit those sites even though I am a total volunteer editing my hobby?

Another example - I like to drink beer - my hobby is beer and I am editing the beer category adding every site I find. I am discriminating against the Shopping Jewelry webmasters because as a volunteer I don't care to edit there? I would rather add my beer sites.

OK - 4000 sites were added yesterday - they were not added by one person - they were added by hundreds of different editors most of them editing there hobbies.

I can go on all day with these types of examples. The only type of discrimination certain types of sites receive is the fact that the webmasters in that industry are too greedy to list competitors sites so they never can apply right to be an editor. Either that or they just don't have the skills to be an editor. Categories get edited by EDITOR INTEREST. It is a VOLUNTEER DIRECTORY. No one is getting PAID to do this except for one oh so lucky staff member. If noone is interested in listing Mortgage Loan sites, than ain't none going to get listed. If noone is interested in wading through Gambling affiliate spam sites then ain't no Gambling sites going to get listed.

When I joined the directory Blizzard Entertainment - the makes of Diablo, Warcraft, and StarCraft were not getting any of there sites added nor were the fans that were making them by the dozen. Once I joined that changed - I ADDED them ALL. I was even had a site myself - but did that stop me from adding my competition - HELL NO.

I am one of those types of people though that will wade through affiliate spam areas and go into areas of the directory that I have absolutely no interest in to try and help out. Comments like yours about discrimination really make me think twice about doing that kind of stuff. Looks like the saying Sour Grapes and One Bad Apple are really starting to apply here.

Crooner · Apr 7, 2004

thehelper said:
How is it discrimination? If I am a hobby editor and I like to make model airplanes and I am adding model airplane sites I am discriminating against a Real Estate site because I have no interest in that all? I am supposed to go into a Real Estate category and edit those sites even though I am a total volunteer editing my hobby?

Another example - I like to drink beer - my hobby is beer and I am editing the beer category adding every site I find. I am discriminating against the Shopping Jewelry webmasters because as a volunteer I don't care to edit there? I would rather add my beer sites.

OK - 4000 sites were added yesterday - they were not added by one person - they were added by hundreds of different editors most of them editing there hobbies.

I can go on all day with these types of examples. The only type of discrimination certain types of sites receive is the fact that the webmasters in that industry are too greedy to list competitors sites so they never can apply right to be an editor. Either that or they just don't have the skills to be an editor. Categories get edited by EDITOR INTEREST. It is a VOLUNTEER DIRECTORY. No one is getting PAID to do this except for one oh so lucky staff member. If noone is interested in listing Mortgage Loan sites, than ain't none going to get listed. If noone is interested in wading through Gambling affiliate spam sites then ain't no Gambling sites going to get listed.

When I joined the directory Blizzard Entertainment - the makes of Diablo, Warcraft, and StarCraft were not getting any of there sites added nor were the fans that were making them by the dozen. Once I joined that changed - I ADDED them ALL. I was even had a site myself - but did that stop me from adding my competition - HELL NO.

I am one of those types of people though that will wade through affiliate spam areas and go into areas of the directory that I have absolutely no interest in to try and help out. Comments like yours about discrimination really make me think twice about doing that kind of stuff. Looks like the saying Sour Grapes and One Bad Apple are really starting to apply here.

Dear Helper,

Yet again I will try to make my final point.

My reading of the situation is simply this - that there are many angry editors - due it seems by THEIR comments on this thread to - the nonsense they have to deal with by the cheats and scammers.

But sadly AS STATED in this thread by editors - many innocent people who are doing their best are given the same treatment.

Right is right and wrong is wrong - however the fact is there have been contradicting statements by member of the same body - and how can it be wrong unless you are told it is wrong by written example of what is right ?.

The suggestion of trying to help people to improve in order to benifit the overall picture and make everyone happier - it seems has been laughed at by some people.

Comments like - "so what thats the way it is" whilst it may be true - helps no one.

When I started this thread it was my opinion that there might be a better,easier and fairer way of getting a listing and all constructive suggestions were invited.

All the anger and stories of scammers have done nothing to change that opinion.

Good luck to everyone.

hutcheson · Apr 7, 2004

The scammers and innocent submitters are not getting the same treatment.

Scammers are getting ferreted out and rejected. Innocent submitters are getting delayed while we ferret out the scammers.

Frustration all around: scammers furious because they can't get in the ODP; editors tired of wading through the same old muck, and wondering how many sneaking scammers they are letting in; submitters impatient at the delay.

All we can say is, "whose fault is it?" The innocent submitters who just want a site listed? the editors who just want a good directory no matter how much work it takes?

Or the scammers, who impose the extra work on the editors and the delay on the innocent submitters?

We are in a war. Every day we kill an hour or two, block a spammer or two, ferret out a sneaky spammer that got past the last editor ... and delay your listing. But if you're an innocent submitter, we are on your side and suffering abuse from the same enemy.

New Submission Method

Crooner

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Crooner

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giz

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Crooner

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donaldb

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pvgool

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Crooner

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hutcheson

spectregunner

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bobrat

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donaldb

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giz

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Alucard

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thehelper

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hutcheson