Please let me know the status of http://www.PosteRestanteTravel.com, submitted to

The submission has been received and is awaiting review.

Status of http://www.PosteRestanteTravel.com

So any idea of a timeframe?

Due to the nature of the review process, we are unable to estimate the time to review of any given submission. See the FAQ for more details.

http://www.PosteRestanteTravel.com

Well, I better stop bothering you then, as you can't review sites if you're talking to me. Thanks for the quick response.

Website status

I was told to wait until the 7th of January before asking again, and I have been very patient and done so. So, can you please let me know how my application is going? I've been waiting 9 months now and it is impeding my business and unfair as some of my competitors are listed.

Please, at least be decent enough to reply

I have now been waiting nearly a year to have our site submitted. I was asked not to bother you until the 7th of January, but that date has come and gone a long time ago and I continue to wait in silence.

I have also since then decided that the http://www.dmoz.org/Recreation/Travel/Publications/Magazines_and_E-zines/ section would probably be more appropriate, but am scared to have to start this waiting process all over again. If you could please review my site asap and help us to compete with all our competition that is already listed in your directory, I'd really appreciated. Maybe you can also decide which area would be most appropriate.

Regards,
Pat Clark

No, we don't do prioritized site reviews based on forum requests. Editors choose their own priorities when they are editing.

Yes, we do decide which area is most appropriate. But we do that for every site (not just the ones referenced in this forum), and we do that (very efficiently) at dmoz.org

The "waiting process" starts over from the beginning every day. There is never any continuity from day to day. Your site will either get reviewed today ... or it'll start over all over again tomorrow, regardless of what you do.

No, we won't help you compete. We're not into competition here. We cooperate with people who are cooperating with placing the sum of human knowledge online. If your site gets listed at all, it will not be because it competes with anyone, but because in some way it DOESN'T compete -- that is, in some way it presents information for which there is NO competition.

If you're worried about competitive position -- there are many people who can help you, and I'd recommend you consult with some of them. But from your point of view, we're the people who are already helping some of your competition. And anything we do for you, we'd happily do for ALL your competition -- first.

In the interim, there is no evidence that an editor has yet to touch your site, which menas it is stil waiting and has not been rejected.

You took me up wrong

Firstly, perhaps I used the word competition wrongly. We are a FREE web site listing FREE information written by REAL travel writers. We do not make any money whatsoever from our site, but we just want to be popular, thus the competition. We are NOT FOR PROFIT, but for the benefit of all travellers out there.

Secondly, I don't understand what you're saying about starting over every day. When I contacted your site last fall, I was told to wait until January 7th to contact you again as the sites are reviewed at certain times. Now you're telling me they're reviewed every day in no order? Why then would I have had to wait to contact you again?

Please help me understand why no one has even bothered to look at our site in a year's time. Or better still, please visit our site and you will hopefully see that we are the kind of site you are looking for.

I was told to wait until January 7th to contact you again as the sites are reviewed at certain times.

Click to expand...

No, you misunderstood the response you were given then. What Hutcheson says is correct.

Why then would I have had to wait to contact you again?

Click to expand...

That has nothing to do with the Open Directory, and everything to do with this site, resource-zone.com. So many people ask for status of their site suggestions, that if there was no required interval between status requests, it would be impossible to provide this service.

Meanwhile, over at dmoz.org, editors review sites, which they find through search engines, in the papers, on signs and billboards, and among the sites that the public suggests to us. Neither source is more important than any other. In addition, nobody can tell which categories will be edited, or by which editor(s), and it is impossible to know why any one particular site has not been reviewed. It is a frustrating process from the point of view of the web master, but it results in a quickly growing, comprehensive directory - which is our goal.

Pat,

To your first point - if this is evident to the editor who reviews the site (and I haven't looked at the site, so I can't say one way or another), then you will have no problem.

Sites are not "reviewed at certain times" - there is a huge huge pool for unreviewed sites in the ODP, and editors can review them according to their interest in a particular subject. This means that certain topics get more attention than others, based on the interests of the editors. That is a strength and at the same time a weakness of the ODP. So it is utterly impossible to guess when a volunteer editor will come along and decide to review sites in a particular category. Hope this explains it better.

As for waiting - what we try to avoid on theis forum is the "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" principle. When we first started it, that was precisely what we got - people asking us every week about their site. It got to the point where editors were spending more time replying to status requests than editing, and that is not something we really want to do.

Hope this clarifies.

Advertising is the solution

Thank you for your explanation. It is a shame the FAQs do not provide this level of understanding.

It is also a shame that this is the way the directory system works. By the sounds of what you have said, there would be a much better chance of somebody stumbing across our site and deciding to add it to the directory if we were a famous site that could afford advertising - however, you earlier said that you discourage competition. Ironically people advertise so that they are chosen over their competition, so you can see why I am so confused at why the system has to be so contradictory and confusing.

I cannot afford advertising so I will probably never be reviewed, judging by what I have read on this forum. GREAT - the dmoz is missing out on a really cool site.

I cannot afford advertising so I will probably never be reviewed

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You could not be more wrong.

Last night I reviewed health relates sites that have multiple offices in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Tonight I may review sites by Vietnam veterans.

Tomorrow I may do either sites belonging to public relations agencies or individual who have the hobby of airplane spotting.

This is how the directory works. Each editor decides where he or she wants to edit (constrained only by the areas in which they have permission to edit) and there is no central dispatch, no grand-poobah of ODP who dispatches editors to attack a given submission queue. Some nights an editor may choose to put a dent in a category with a huge pile of submissions, or may decide to knock off several dozen smaller cateogries that have one or two sites waiting, or they may have picked up a free apartment guide at the supermarket, and have decided to go through the pages and add all the URLs they find for apartment complexes in their hometown.

What we are trying to convey to you is that there is a great randomness to the editing process, and they there is really no ethical way in which it can be influenced. So when we say to someone that every day is a new day, what we are trying to convey is that the fact that you were not reviewed yesterday, does NOT move you one day closer to being reviewed. You start today just as you started yesterday, and just as you will start tomorrow: just one of many, many sites waiting for one of 10,000 active editors to happen along.

From our point of view, your emphasis in advertising is puzzling. What do we care for it? It's all noise. Of course, it is (as you say) all about competition, which we don't do either. If you're looking for either of them, you will indeed be puzzled by the amount of work done here -- to so little apparent purpose.

And there's no system -- just tools to help people cooperate, and people who are willing to cooperate. Why do they cooperate? Every one has a different reason. Saddam's Iraq may have spoken with one voice (he had a vote to prove it), but the ODP speaks with ten thousand of them. Do they always agree? No.

>I cannot afford advertising so I will probably never be reviewed...

Judging by what you've said on this forum, you can't get your mind off advertising, so you probably will never create a site we'd be interested in. But -- and this is the important point -- the site won't be judged by this forum. It'll be judged on its content. Even if you advertise in the meantime.