Protest the Irresponsible Policy.

Hi, I am appalled that an organization of this magnitude and power will not receive site status requests any longer.

It is the people who submit websites to this directory that make it so strong and now the administrators (who at one time or another probably all benefited greatly from this site) have effectively shut us out? That's just wrong and immoral.

If you agree, simply reply to this post with an "I agree".

Regards,
Mike

"With great power comes great responsibility"
- Unknown

To the moderator: Do you want to create a poll. I think the results would suprise this poster.

It is the people who submit websites to this directory that make it so strong

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Actually, just the opposite is true. submitted sites are but one possible source of listings, and based on history, they are about the least useful source of listings.

That's just wrong and immoral.

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I agree.

It is wrong and immoral the way that people try to manipulate the Directory for their own purposes.

It is wrong and immoral that more than 95% of all submissions in certain fairly large areas of the directory are malicious.

It is wrong and immoral the way that spammers attempted to manipulatre the status checks for their own good, and destroyed what had the potential of being a useful service.

Hi, I am appalled that an organization of this magnitude and power will not receive site status requests any longer.

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We offered them as a courtesy, not a right. And we chose to withdraw that courtesy when it caused more trouble than benefit. It's not open for debate or polling so this thread will be closed.

It is the people who submit websites to this directory that make it so strong...

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No, actually it's the sites that editors add to the directory that make it so strong, whether they're suggested by the site owners or uncovered by editors some other way. If people were to stop submitting sites to the directory, the directory would still grow at at least the rate that it does now if not more.

>... an organization of this magnitude and power ...

Um, are you referring to the U.S. Marines? the KGB? Or have you confused a group of volunteers that have agreed to work together to build a website .... with something else? All the power I have is what I can do with one brain and two hands on a computer. And I have it (at the ODP) only so long as the community agrees I'm doing a good job of what I do.

And the organization has no power, no power AT ALL EXCEPT ... a coherent beneficient vision, and the persuasion it can exercise on public-spirited volunteers.

The trail of responsibility is simple: each editor is responsible to the community, and the community is responsible to ... to whom? To editors, certainly (who were promised that their work would be given away to those customers freely.) To anyone else? Surely, to customers. But what do we owe to customers? A good directory. So all our work should be in the direction of improving the directory. And ... the improved directory is released each week. Anyone can look at it and ask, "is this better than last week?" Anyone can look at it and tell us, "you made a mistake here" -- and watch to see how long it takes to fix mistakes.

That's the responsibility, and that's the full accounting for it -- to all the world.

Editors never need to justify what they DON'T do. (We can't. I failed to review about 20 million (or so) websites today. So did each of my fellow editors. Of course, 90% of them wouldn't have been listable anyway, so each of us also failed to list each of about 2 million websites. That's a lot of inaction to account for! In fact, we can't account for it, and we aren't going to try.