Not listed yet...possible problem?

I'm new here and i'm sure this question has been raised a million times.

Submitted URL 10 months ago and still not listed. Is DMOZ that backed up? Or was I rejected?

Also, would it be a burden to run a quick recordset that returns the status of a submitted URL? Three codes only A = approved, R = rejected & P = pending.

My bet is that if this were done, DOMZ would only be swampped with rejection emails

Thank you

We don't give status information for specific sites. Assuming your site is listable (and, no, I'm not going to go look), ten months is not an unusually long wait.

Thats all I wanted to know, Thanks...well not quite

Why does DOMZ not want submitters to know the status. Logically & proven through years of experience, in any business of high volume, the more a customer knows their status, the less the phone rings with questions. Same should apply to DMOZ. I outlined how to do it. Implementation should take less than 1 hour and DMOZs inbound questions will be greatly reduced. Then the editors can get back to editing.

Thanks again for your answer.

Why does DOMZ not want submitters to know the status.

Click to expand...

The main reason is that providing the information is more trouble than it is worth. Spammers use the information to renew and redouble their efforts, and the aver person suggesting their site cannot do anything if they do learn their status.

So what are the possible statuses?

1. Denied. So what are you going to do if this is the case, suggest it again? Fix it? How? The vast majority of unlistable sites are so fundamentally flawed that they need to be restarted from scratch. If the issue is minor, many editors will try and contact the site owner to let them know about it. I used to do that, and only received a reply on about 10% of the people I notified, and about half of the replies I received were obscene rants that I didn't just list their "magnificent" site right away, or they wanted to know the name of my boss so they could appeal.

2. Listed. Duh! Why do the editors need to tell you that?

3. Unreviewed. OK, it is unreviewed, what could you possibly do with that information? What does the directory gain by sharing that information?

The constant demand for status checks is like a three year old wanting to play with a book of matches. No possible good can come of it.

he more a customer knows their status

Click to expand...

You very wrongfully assume that a person suggesting a site is an ODP customer.

Possible reason it either your site is rejected or not reviewed. I have seen many categories in ODP that are not edited since long time.

spectregunner said:

So what are the possible statuses?

1. Denied. So what are you going to do if this is the case, suggest it again? Fix it? How?

2. Listed. Duh! Why do the editors need to tell you that?

3. Unreviewed. OK, it is unreviewed, what could you possibly do with that information? What does the directory gain by sharing that information?

You very wrongfully assume that a person suggesting a site is an ODP customer.

Click to expand...

You are right, wrong choice of wording. I should have said "submitter"

1 Denied...Lets see. What good could come of knowing this? Well for 1 thing it ends the question of "what happened to my submittal". DMOZ editor enters a small paragraph on why it's denied. No further discussion, submittal deleted after a certain amount of time.

2. Listed...yes redundant.

3. Pending...With that information, I at least know it is still in que. That's all anyone needs to know. Most of this forum and others like it are people who are wondering if they are still in que.

The argument that it would be a lot of trouble and burden on editors would be correct if the programmer programmed it incorrectly. Correctly programmed, the editor would have no input at all. It would be transparent except for the "denied" explanation. Fully automated.

"The constant demand for status checks" would not fall on the editor. Again, fully automated and no maintainace involved. Completely transparent to the editorial staff. And I fully disagree with you. A whole boat load of good can and would come of it. One good thing that would come of it is that I wouldn't be writing this post.

Thank you for your responses.

Most of this forum and others like it are people who are wondering if they are still in que.

Click to expand...

That's true.

But what are they going to DO with that information?

If they're honest people, nothing.

But if they're sleazoid spammers, they will wait until their spammy submittal has been deleted, and then immediately submit again. Or start writing malicious e-mails, or filing slanderous abuse reports, or stalking editors.



In practical terms, giving this information to spammers enables them to maximize the efficiency of their malicious submittals. And giving the information to honest people enables them to ... ignore the ODP and go on with their life. Which, with sufficient self-control, anyone can learn to do, even without specific feedback.

I know how it feels to wait. I've prepared several dozen books for publication on some internet archive or library, and I still wait with bated breath for that information.

However, I'd much rather the librarians spend their time posting contributed material than giving status reports.

And as for how hard the programmers would have to work: I'm a programmer. I have attempted to rough out a definition of what could be safely and usefully reported; and I can confidently affirm that your analysis is inadequate.

As for keeping you from posting here: no problem, there are always people here willing to teach as much as you can learn.

spectregunner's post mostly covers why we no longer give status checks here. When people were told their sites had been denied, arguments generally started up. It really became pointless to continue. If you know your site meets our guidelines for listability, then it shouldn't ever be rejected, right? Therefore your site should only be in one of two states: listed or not-yet-reviewed.

Regarding automating status information (and there are issues with implementing such a system that would require a great deal of internal discussion), it's been suggested many times over the years. Whether or not AOL will ever implement anything like that in the future, I couldn't tell you. If they do ever plan on it, it certainly wouldn't be a high priority.

This way of looking at things might help correct your perspective. You mention a status "suggestion denied." That's not a realistic description of any status. There is, however, a status SFAEDUSITAWLTGA (or, "someone filed another expletive-deleted USELESS suggestion...ignore them and with luck they'll go away.")

The whole point is, that status contains only one bit of useful information: the person that provided it is someone who's not worth talking to, because they DON'T provide useless information. And that information is made more useful by NOT being reported.

But here's the problem. It's kind of hard to keep the "ACCEPTED" status secret. The world knows. And, as you say, there are (at some level of oversimplification) only three possible statuses. And your programmer friends will tell you that if we report the "PENDING" status, by simple logic we're also letting slip the "SFAEDUSITAWLTGA" status. At which point that small-but-significant number of psychos unleashes the threats and slander program.

So, basically, honest site suggestors have to learn self-control on their own, in order to protect editors from unnecessary personal abuse.

I know your feeling, and--this world being what it is--if you've been involved in pro-bono work for very long, you'll probably understand ours from your own experience.

I am up against spammers and the rest of the Internet's scum every day, day in day out, and on weekends. I can see your points clearly. I didn't take into account that spammers will ruthlessly attack with more crap postings if they knew they were denied. I'm too optimistic and probable shouldn't be when concerning the web. It's one hell of an evil place.

We're done.
Thank you for all your input.

Thanks for understanding.

I really started out on the other side of this discussion. But that was several internet lifetimes ago and ... we tried some experiments first, before committing ourselves irrevocably to something lethal.

There are some possible statuses:
1. Site isn't submitted yet.
2. Some scammer trying to submit it
3. Scammer waits - maybe he is lucky enough...
4. 2 years passs... Oh, damn, he is not lucky enough!
5. Scammer go right to resource-zone and trying to post his 2 cents here...

Good luck!

In my 20,000+ edits when I was an active editor, the single greatest reason for not listing a site was:

Insufficient unique content.

A distant second was:

Site still under construction (and yes, we all know that no website is ever truly finished, burt a website with large sections marked "coming soon' or 'under construction' or 'future content' are not listable.

Well that sucks, I have two sections like that in the site I submitted. Not because the site wasn't done but because that part of the business is not up and running yet. We still want our customers to see that that is "Coming Soon" though.

Finding out that the interesting looking link s/he just clicked on has no significant content behind it is pretty sucky for the surfer too.

My recommendation? Get rid of deliberate dead links and add a page called Our Future Plans or some such. That way, interested folks can find out about them and those wanting to buy a green widget right now won't waste their time.

Well that's basically what it is.

I used to keep a list of "under construction" sites I declined to list, I would go back every six months or so and look at them to see if they had finished them.

Very few ever finished the under construction parts before their domains eventally expired.

but you may just told why your site is not being listed, just a little bit

That information is already available - see http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/include.html .

textlink969 said:

but you may just told why your site is not being listed, just a little bit

Click to expand...

Well I'd like my site listed with DMOZ, but on the other hand I'm not going to change something that I think is useful information to our customers because it doesn't meet DMOZ "standards" for inclusion.
And the other thing that might be keeping site from inclusion is no editor....