paylessdecor.com

Hi,
We recently had our website (www.paylessdecor.com) added to the dmoz directory under the category: http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Windows/Window_Coverings/

However, when i search for "payless decor" under dmoz, there is no match. What is the reason for this?

-sina

Re: search for title with no matches

Your site is not listed there, only listed sites are covered by the search engine. All entries must be reviewed by an editor before they are visible, so please be patient.

Re: search for title with no matches

I believe our site is listed there. If you follow the link: http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Windows/Window_Coverings/
you'll see half way down in the list It says Payless Decor.

-sina

Re: search for title with no matches

Seems it was accidently added and then deleted almost immediately. It's possible the public server is still displaying it, as there is sometimes a delay in catching up with editor changes.

It's still waiting to be reviewed. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: search for title with no matches

Honestly, there appears to be some sort of conspiracy from someone at dmoz against our website. We've submitted it almost a dozen times over the last seven months and it hasn't been included. Its a great site that people would be very grateful to visit. This person who deleted us. Would you please let us know who it is or have them email me directly because I just want to make sure its not somebody who has a conflict of interest as one of our competitors which is causing them to delete the listing.

-sina

Re: search for title with no matches

We've submitted it almost a dozen times over the last seven months and it hasn't been included.

Click to expand...

Many suggested sites wait much longer than seven months, so that in itself does not indicate that you've been singled out. Since you submitted many times (which is against the submission policies of the ODP) there have been several duplicate submissions that were at various times deleted by different editors. It looks as if your site may have been accidentally listed and/or deleted during this procedure. For that, we apologise.

We don't, however, ever give out the names of individual editors or encourage them to email submitters. This forum is the way to communicate with ODP editors without any risk for us. If you suspect abuse, read this post about how to report it.

Finally, as has been stated already, your site is waiting for review, and if you haven't seen it listed in 30 days from now you are welcome to return and ask for status again in this thread.

Re: search for title with no matches

Every time you resubmit, you go to the end of the queue if it's sorted by date of submission. It doesn't make you more prominent in the pool of unreviewed sites at all. You are currently in the appropriate unreviewed queue and need to do nothing more than be patient. FTR, the editor who added your site and immediately put it back in the unreviewed queue is one of the most senior editors and probably hit the wrong button by accident - no naughtiness going on there...

[added :arrow_right: writing at the same time as nea - clearly thinking along the same lines]

Re: search for title with no matches

>submitted it almost a dozen times over the last seven months

You do know that this can actually cause the review of your site to be delayed, right? Each time you re-submit your site it goes back to the bottom of the queue awaiting review. Not all editors choose to edit sites in queue order, but many do. Submitting over and over again every two weeks isn't accomplishing anything productive at all; you should submit it once and then wait patiently for its turn.

[Edited: D'oh! And I'm the slowest of all!]

Re: search for title with no matches

nea and others,

I appreciate your feedback. Perhaps I could provide some feedback as well regarding dmoz. I want to preface with the fact that I understand you are all volunteers and I can appreciate the large scale of the project which you have collectively accomplished. But from a user's perspective, I resubmitted so many times because

1. there is nothing on dmoz.org (probably somebody is going to be able to show me a link once i post this) that mentions resource-zone. So, I only got the URL for this bulletin board after emailing 6 editors. I can see how that could seem excessive and annoying to some, but really, I had no idea why the site wasn't being listed and I had to email that many people just to get one response which told me to post to this bulletin board.

2. On your website, in the FAQ section, it states "Depending on the activity level of the editors in your area, it may take up to 2 weeks or more for your site to be reviewed." One of you stated its not uncommon to not be listed after seven months. Well, if this is the case, that statement on the website is slightly misleading.

3. I never resubmitted the site day after day. There was the span of several weeks between submissions becuase I thought it only took 2 weeks. From our perspective, resubmitting handles those situations where submissions get lost. After all, emails can get lost (UDP is unreliable). Also, on the add.html page it states "If a site you submitted has not been listed after three weeks, you may submit it again or you may send an e-mail to an editor of the category for which the site was submitted." Unfortunately, there isn't an editor to the section I'm submitting to, so I followed the instructions and resubmitted. I didn't realize that even if you waited longer than 3 weeks to resubmit (as I probably did many of the times I submitted it) it would push me to teh end of the queue.

4. Nowhere on the actual site does it say your resubmission gets you back at the bottom of the queue. It states "Again, multiple submissions of the same or related sites may result in the exclusion and/or deletion of those and all affiliated sites.". And honestly, the policy of placing people at the end of the queue is extremely unfair because it opens the road to abuse (my competitors could find out I'm submitting to your directory and keep submitting my domain every day to ensure it doesn't get listed in the directory).

So my suggestion is to include a link to resource-zone. Modify the FAQ to not say it gets done in 2 weeks. And change the submission code to not reset the submission date to the last date submitted. These could all have prevented me from being in the situation I am now, and although you could probably care less, its detrimentally affected my business.

The last thing I want to do with this email is to piss someone off. I'm merely trying to get my site in this category. I even volunteered to be the editor for this category, but becuase of my obvious association with paylessdecor, I couldn't be eligible.

thanks,
-sina

Re: search for title with no matches

>And honestly, the policy of placing people at the end of the queue is extremely unfair

I don't believe this is an intentional policy per se; it's just that the more recently submitted sites are displayed after the less recently submitted ones by default. As I said, not all editors choose to view sites this way. But if you want the very swiftest review possible, it's best to submit it once and leave it be. It's very doubtful we're going to change our code to make earlier submission dates appear on repeat submissions. I don't make those decisions, but if I was a betting woman, I wouldn't bet on any time being spent facilitating repeat submissions at all given that repeat submissions are against our rules anyway.

However, it's highly unlikely your competitors would go out of their way to spam the ODP with your URL, much less that we would penalize you or your site for their misbehavior.

As to your other points, we should take a look at them--there certainly shouldn't be any suggestion in our FAQ that sites might be reviewed in two weeks (though this is true for some categories, it's definitely not something we want to be promising anyone!)

Anyway, as far as I know you haven't been penalized by any of this. Site suggestions can take quite a long time to review; I'm sorry if your misunderstanding about that caused you additional heartburn during this time, but it didn't actually hurt your site, which has not been rejected and is still happily awaiting review.

Re: search for title with no matches

Several of your points have in fact been discussed internally.

The question of what to state as the review time is always a dilemma. Whatever is stated - tends to set a bottom line. So many have though that "two weeks" leads to false expectations and should be changed to something more like three months. But then, for the categories I have where I expect to review within several days, I think that three months is too pessimistic. Saying anywhere from ten minutes to two years is more realistic, but sounds facetious.

Having a link from Dmoz to Resource-zone has been discussed - since many do not know about it. [I only found out about RZ by accident a few weeks before I became an editor.] However, RZ [this forum] is independant of ODP, and was set up by a group of editors [not me] by themselves, so there are questions about "officially" having a link from there to here.

[Added]
And for the categories which I devote less time to, two years and more might have been more correct a couple of months ago, until I caught up with the backlog.

Re: search for title with no matches

Check out http://forums.dmoz.org/ and follow the links.

Hello Again,

Just checking to see if we are still in the queue for the section:
http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Home_and_G...ndow_Coverings/

Also, if somebody could provide me with the date of our submission, I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks

Your site is awaiting review in http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Windows/Window_Coverings/ and as far as I can tell, it was submitted on Jan/05/2004

I'll add my here to personally vouch for the integrity of the editor who mistakenly clicked the wrong button and then moved your site back to unreviewed. Sometimes we edit long hours and being human we all make mistakes. This particular editor would cut off his own hands before he'd let them do something dishonest, I promise you.

Now I'm going to bend a rule. Since your site is the next to be reviewed and I already have the window open, and I'm tired of working in the category I've been working in, I'm going to go ahead and edit in that category for the next hour or so but you won't see any results for a few days and I can't promise whether it will be accepted, moved or declined.

Check the directory in a few days, if it's not listed that means I had to move you and you may come back for another update in 6 months per forum guidelines.

compostannie said:

I'll add my here to personally vouch for the integrity of the editor who mistakenly clicked the wrong button and then moved your site back to unreviewed. Sometimes we edit long hours and being human we all make mistakes. This particular editor would cut off his own hands before he'd let them do something dishonest, I promise you.

Click to expand...

Whoa.. no need to take it that far..

But you're a great human being for doing this. We've been waiting for a while, so we're very thankful.

-sina

Patience is rewarded

Published in http://dmoz.org.Shopping/Home_and_Garden/Windows/Window_Coverings -- allow a few days for all the public servers to get updated