Problems with odp?

Problems with resource zone/dmoz/odp...?

Firstly the thinking and principal of resource zone /dmoz odp is good one were people who review sites for what they are and not monetary gain, should make for a better directory that’s not just full of big multinationals or alike or ad word driven, But am a little puzzled at why the site submission has been not working for such a long time

If it’s a matter of finance I’m sure people would be happy to make donations…?

If it’s a software issue with all the people that use and are involved already with this I’m sure the expertise is available and many would be happy to give this free of charge

There also seems to be many area’s that don’t have editors but there seem to be many people apply to be I understand that some may have ulterior motives but surely not all, If New editors and existing were all moved to different categories on a rota system then all the knockers and claims of corruption could also be halted…?

It seems that if the resource zone /dmoz odp are to be respected as it once was it must sort out the issue with people being able to submit there sites and there being enough editors. Or is it going to go altogether ?

The fact that suggestions cannot yet be made by non-editors is certainly disappointing, but makes almost no difference to editors, who still find and list good sites and attend to all the other matters which keep the directory growing and functioning.
As we frequently point out, the fact that non-editors can suggest sites is merely to help editors find good sites to add, but there are many much more effective ways of doing this, and all of those methods are unaffected by the continuing technical problems which, by the way, are in the hands of AOL staff, not editors. So I'm afraid we have no more idea than you do what the problem is, or when it may be fixed.

As for accepting new editors, yes you are quite right that not all applicants are unacceptably self-interested or dishonest. In fact, as you can see from the public ODP reports, until the servers went down we were accepting hundreds of new editors each month, so we are certainly keen to see this feature restored as soon as possible.

Thank you for your comments. I/we appreciate the concern and interest.

The recent issues do not have a monetary aspect. AOL has been more than fair in its funding of this not-for-profit project. The most recent issue was one of hardware failure compounded by a number of software and proeedural issues, some of which had been identified prior to the failure.

I am afraid that your well-meaning thoughts on eidtors are based upon some faulty premises. Allow me to clarify.

There is no category that is without an editor as there are more than 200 editors with directory-wide permissions. In addition, when an editor is a named editor of a given category, that editor can edit in any cateogry that is below it on the directory tree.

Perhaps a real-life example would help. When I expressed an interested in editing within the Regional part of the directory, I was given what one might call apprentice permission (we call it greenbusting) to edit within Regional/North_America/United_States/Arizona. As a greenbuster, I could work the submissions pool anywhere in Arizona, but my edits had to be approved by a more experienced regional editor. I was already an experienced editor with almost 1,400 edits under by belt, and I had a more experienced editor who had agreed to help me learn the nuances of editing in Regional, and to approve or reject my edits.

Some three months and about 900 total edits later, I was given unrestricted editing permission in Regional/North_America/United_States/Arizona/Localities. this meant that I could edit any category that was part of a city and town in Arizona. Easily a thousand categories. My name did not appear on any of those cats, but I certainly can and did edit from A to Z.

Three months and 1,900 edits later I was given permission to edit in Regional/North_America/United_States/Arizona -- which meant I had unrestriced editing rights for any category within Arizona.

A couple of months later I was granted permission to edit in Regional/North_America/United_States/Florida/Localities. three and a half months later I was given statewide editing rights in Florida. Seven months later I was given statewide editing rights in Nebraska. Fifteen months later, and I was given rights for all of the United States -- and I am now approaching 20,000 total edits (not all in Regional -- I have broad permissions in other parts of the directory).

And that is how it goes. I don't know how many total categories I can edit in within Regional, but I know that it accounts for more than 600,000 listed sites. thus, I can state with absolute assurance that no Locality within thre United States is without an editor in addition to the 200+ editors with directory-wide rights I mentioned earlier -- and without trying to ignore then other 21 editors who have the same level of rights within the United States.

With regards to your concept of rotation -- I'm not sure what it would fix given the way permissions are requested and granted. Editors are free to apply for editing rights to any category of their choosing -- they go through the same application process as a new editor with two notable additions: first, their editing history is subject to review; and second, their total number of edits are considered, so someone with a total of 18 edits would not be favorably considered for a category with 2,654 sites and 68 subcategories.

The other fundamental misunderstanding (and if you have any ideas on how we can better get the word out on this, we'd love to hear them) is that the ODP is absolutely not a listing service. No on ehas the right to a listing and we make no commitments as to when we will look at a given suggestion. Yet, daily someone posts that ...it has been four months since they submitted and when are we editors going to get off our lazy butts and review their site -- they are losing money because of us.

Again, thank you for your politely stated concerns and suggestions.

Yes, I think the submission problem is money. Why don't they charge a nominal fee of say $5.00 per submission, and give the editors $1.00 or $2.00 for their time?

Editing here is a hobby and it would be against our Social Contract. There are plenty of paid entry directories around if that's what you're seeking .

>But am a little puzzled at why the site submission has been not working for such a long time

There was a nasty system crash coupled with some catastrophic recovery attempts. See the Announcement posted at the top of each forum.

The techies are focussing on getting everything back to working. There are some very important things not yet working. And there are some minor but irritating things not yet working.

"Suggest a site" is "minor but irritating." I'm sure it'll get fixed eventually. And I'm sure the techies have sense enough to focus on the important things first.

If you thought it took long to get a site listed before, just wait...

Once all systems are working again, the editors are going to get slammed with a backlog of people who have been trying to submit for the past 3 months. Unless the ODP plans on doubling their work force, this recovery is going to last a long, long time.

Human-edited directories were a decent idea at one point, but they are grossly inadequate when it comes to keeping up with a constantly-evolving web. There's just too much volume, and it's changing every second.

This current outage is only putting the ODP further and further back into irrelevance.

Oldham, this ofcourse would only be true if DMOZ would see it as their task to review all suggested sites within a certain timeframe (aka a listing service for webmasters). Luckely it is not.
I for instance have added around 150 sites since the editor functionality was back online (december 18), only 50 of them were from the pool of suggested sites the others I have found myself using several different sources, and I estimate that I have rejected also around 100 suggestions because these sites were either already listed or didn't meet our guidelines.
With the project I am now working on I probably will be adding some 1000 mores listings in the coming month or two and I already know that of these less than 10 will be from the pool of suggested sites. Is this usefull. Yes, for DMOZ, I am buiding a group of categories that is not available yet in my language. And the nice thing is (atleast for me) it is a very uncommercial category (off the 75 sites I already put in this new category only about 5 had any form of advertisement on them, the rest of the sites was pure content).

>Once all systems are working again, the editors are going to get slammed with a backlog of people who have been trying to submit for the past 3 months. Unless the ODP plans on doubling their work force, this recovery is going to last a long, long time.

A lot of people don't know any more mathematics than to think something like this, so it's worth pointing out the elementary mistakes in it: and if people don't learn to think more carefully, at least they may learn what they are competant to think about.

In a non-cyclic queuing system like site suggestions, there can really be only one bottleneck. (If you think there are two bottlenecks, then think about how the flow through each one changes if the flow through the other decreases!)

If editors review fewer sites, are fewer sites listed? Of course! While if few sites are suggested, are fewer sites listed? (1) Certainly not for a long time, because there is a large pool already, (2) But (I believe) not ever, because there are other ways--often better ways--of finding good sites.

So: it really really matters that editors can edit again. But it won't matter AT ALL, EVER, whether site suggesters suggest sites daily -- or pile them up for six months and then dump them in one gigantic binge suggestion session. Site reviews and site listings can still go on as normal.

So don't worry about what'll happen to the system if site suggestions are down for another three months. Mathematically, it really can't matter.

Now, we still want the missing functionality back! Even if it's not critical or necessary or reliable or unbiassed, it is still a source of information, and we're information junkies. (But, again, we'll get along fine temporarily without it--just as those of us who're old enough to remember Lycos and AltaVista, are getting along fine without them.)

And professional webmasters and SEOers -- we're not worried about them at all. We know we don't need them, and too many of them think they need the ODP. So they'll do whatever they have to do -- even if that means keep a MySQL list of sites pending the great suggest-a-thon. As always, they'll take care of themselves, and nobody else needs to worry about them a bit.

What we're losing--and worry about, and WILL definitely miss--is the new editor (we can't take editing applications) and the casual pro-bono site suggestor who might become an enthusiastic amateur editor.