Okay to Submit Other People's Sites?

Is it okay to submit websites that we don't own or have anything to do with?

I've submitted two sites in the last two days that are not mine. I think that they are high quality sites, and I didn't see them in the ODP. I don't know if the owners have ever submitted their URLs to the ODP or not. If they have, could my submissions negatively affect theirs?

It's OK.
No, you won't cause any problem for the webmaster.

Thank you for having enough interest in the directory to want to help out.

Thanks. That's good to know.

Given that a site owner/operator may well have already submitted their site, would other submissions not get on Editors' nerves sufficiently to have a detrimental effect on the site's possible listing in DMOZ, or its existing place in this list of sites to review?

In other words, this could encourage sabotage as well as helpful intent, could it not? How do the DMOZ editors view this, really?

Matt.

In my experience this has not been a problem.

Hi

I have been told by an editor that every time a site is re-submitted the previous submission is overwritten. Surely everything goes back to square one/day one and your site is back at the bottom of the review list again. If not, I'd like to know what the situation is with the site I submitted 5 months ago and re-submitted last week.

Please see the response you were given about your site in this thread, and don't ask the same question in many different places. Thanks!

As for the general case, there is no "bottom of the review list". Sites are usually not reviewed in any kind of first suggested - first reviewed order.

Jim Noble said to me "Please be aware that resubmissions replace earlier ones, destroying all evidence of their existence." That was what I was referring to. I am just interested in what questions other people are asking and this seemed appropriate to mention.

I hope I haven't offended anyone.

Wild paranoid suspicion is ... um, I suspect, an inherent part of the human experience. There are still people who believe in the giant conspiracies to kill Kennedy, frame O.J., and bury some single specified affiliate site deep in the Google sandbox. If you've done business with Stalin, or Microsoft, or the RIAA -- or thought about it -- perhaps paranoia is a survival characteristic. So I probably shouldn't criticize it in general.

But in the ODP, in my limited experience (I've only been doing this five years) sites that are good enough to be submitted by surfers, aren't going to suffer from over-submittal. It's the borderline cases shotgun-spammed by their webmasters that get hurt -- and that is as it ought to be, so there's certainly no incentive to devise mechanisms to avoid what is so evidently not a problem.

So, you're saying that Jim Noble is wrong then. Resubmissions do not replace earlier ones, destroying all evidence of their existence.

All very confusing!

No Jim is right. If you submit the same url to the same category twice, the second submission will overwrite the first.

I'm sorry I'm still confused, so hutcheson is wrong then?

Sometimes resubmissions of the same site replace the old submission, and sometimes they don't. It's not worth worrying about the precise conditions.

No it's not important unless you're a an honest web site owner, who has followed all the rules (as far as he/she can tell) and hasn't filled their site with spam or anything else dmoz illegal.

There are a lot of mixed messages here. I'm not going to say any more as it seems a little pointless, just excuse us poor mortals for thinking this thread is as clear as mud!

If you're an honest website owner, who follows the submittal policies, you won't have problems. And if you do have problems, editors will be glad to help you get around them.

If you aren't, we can't predict exactly what problems you'll have, only that (1) they will NOT be limited to site-effects of ODP procedures, and (2) they can NOT be evaded by manipulation of the ODP procedures, and (3) the editors may well act to make them worse -- as a matter of keeping the ODP running efficiently.

Jim refers to a specific automatic procedure: his answer is with specific reference to that, and it is accurate (insofar as that automatic procedure works, which is most of the time.)

I spoke with reference to the more general question: what are the practical effects of the automatic procedures Jim describes (as well as the behavior of real editors, in the presence of actual submittal behaviors.) And I say in tens of thousands of edits I have never once seen an actual confirmed problem of the sort you're worried about. Submittal date isn't that big a deal at best; in the presence of sites good enough to be suggested by surfers, it's an absolute non-problem.

It isn't worth your time to worry about ODP procedures. They're designed to get good sites listed, and if they cease to be effective, editors will be the first ones to complain. But they are effective because the people that work them want to list good sites. THAT'S your defense against accidental rejection -- not that there's a bullet-proof, idiot-proof, corruption-proof Grand Procedure For Everything -- but that there are editors who want to list sites.

Thank you hutcheson for a down-to-earth straightforward answer. The mud has now cleared!