Not knowing, we resubmitted

I see this almost daily:
"It was first submitted last year. Not knowing we should not have it was re-submitted"

Even I did this. Why can't the guidelines be reorganized to highlight not only procedure put common mistakes to avoid? I'm fairly new to all this and maybe this is too closely related to:
"Why can't I have feedback on my rejected site?”(hutcheson)
My concern is for both the legitimate webmaster being lumped with spammers and the needless hour’s editors waist sifting through additional submittals and answering the same questions in forums. Even a few graphics in the guidelines wouldn't hurt would it?

Or how many times do you see the UNIQUE CONTENT issue come up? Wouldn't some obvious examples be helpful? I see the same type of sites being rejected constantly. I go and look at their site and understand why. If a webmaster had a list of 4 or 5 common bad sites to compare to, I think that it would diminish the number of submittals of those types in that list.

No, I would not be a good candidate to reorganize the guidelines and I know that giving examples will not solve that entire problem but it might curtail it. I would think any help would be welcomed.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but I thought I would ask anyway.

No. 'nuff said. You will not get what you want here.

thehelper said:

No. 'nuff said. You will not get what you want here.

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Huh. Well, *that* wasn't very helpful. Luggagebase has made some interesting, thoughtful posts in the forum. I'm surprised to see such a curt and useless answer to his inquiry.

Luggagebase, I suspect that this issue has been discussed on the internal editor forums in the past. And while I can imagine some reasons they might not want to do it, I can't imagine any good ones. There does seem to be some tension between "Let's make our policies totally transparent" and "Let's keep things a secret so that spammers have a hard time."

I agree with you that the "suggestion guidelines" could be improved. By pointing out the top reasons for rejection, writing in simpler language, and reformatting to make it easier to read, DMOZ could probably eliminate much of the time and effort wasted in places like this forum.

Of course, the people who might re-write the "suggestions guidelines" are likely not the same ones who spend time answering update requests.

Nareau

It seems quite easy, perhaps, but it's got more to it than just listing common mistakes and unlistable sites.

Common mistakes, first - we have tried to address some of these in our FAQ. (See this link, for instance, about why resubmitting isn't necessary.) As you know this isn't an official forum, and the R-Z FAQ can't replace the suggest-a-site guidelines, but we do think it is helpful nonetheless.

Nareau, you are right about this having been discussed internally. One problem is that many people don't read the submission guidelines today, and the more text we present, the less likely submitters are to read it. We've been criticized for having too much text there as it is!

Another thing is, if we take the resubmissions as an example, that one resubmission won't hurt anybody; if somebody discovers a better category after submitting we are quite happy for them to suggest it again to the better category - it will save editors' time if they don't have to move it. And if they resubmit to the same category it usually overwrites the previous submission, and despite popular myths, that very rarely has any impact on the time until review. The people who resubmit more than once, to many categories, have already broken the suggest-a-site guidelines as they are today!

Rewriting the guidelines to make them easier to read - yes, perhaps. But we don't want to sacrifice clarity, and anyway one person's "easy-to-read" is another person's "incomprehensible-garble". Remember that we have people from all over the world suggesting sites, and while the guidelines are translated into many languages, English is still the main language for the directory.

I'm afraid that we think that graphics would hurt. People on a slow modem line, having to pay theit phone bill per minute (which includes some of our editors) should be able to use the site. People using Netscape 4, WebTV, IE pre-5, Lynx, Safari and Mosaic should be able to use the site. I know that's not at all obvious to most of our users, and it's not a silly suggestion - just not one we'll want to implement. (And again we have the different languages and cultures thing!)

As for examples of bad sites, that's a different kettle of smoked eels, and this posting is too long as it is

If a webmaster had a list of 4 or 5 common bad sites to compare to, I think that it would diminish the number of submittals of those types in that list.

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Yes, if the webmaster is honest and clear-sighted about their own web site

We are building a directory, using the good, content-rich sites we find. This might sound heartless, but we really aren't that concerned about the owners of sites that are too contentless to fit anywhere in the directory. When they ask for status and there is an issue that is fixable, we usually tell them; otherwise, we don't.

Making a list of bad sites they can compare themselves to is not something that is going to happen for several reasons: the sites that could get on the lists would be so obviously bad that no self-respecting webmaster would want to compare their site to it (and imagine how many people we'd have here saying "We're WAY better than scammyscams.com that's on your list, so we are good enough to be listed!" Site review doesn't work like that.

Then, there is no master rule for How Much Content Is Enough. It varies between category trees for one thing, and in some cats it increases with time (directories would be one example of this.) Sometimes a site doesn't have enough content for one category but enough for its small hometown in Regional. And so on. In fact most unique websites that are suggested from the outside have unique content.

We wouldn't get away from the problem with the minority of abusers by trying to give examples of what we don't want - we are quite certain they know it already! Again, if the problem seems to be minor we usually try and tip the webmaster off. If it is a major problem it is simply not a website we want in the directory, and it would be a waste of time to try and change it just enough so it would squeeze in.