questions for the editors

Howard Dean

Well then, I'll take your Howard Dean challenge and join as an editor.

This thread has been blogged already: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000261.shtml

I am pleased that people feel this is a good resource - I think there are some excellent points made here about what we are trying to do with the directory (and how our priorities often don't intersect with those of web site promoters).

I posted a link to this thread in SearchGuild
http://www.searchguild.com/tpage8903-0.html
and the mod picked up in his blog.

This is a good thread - should be a sticky at the top.

Well, it seems that in my quest for a few answers (and a pretty good sarcastic rant!) that I've started something. We'll see just how long it lasts.

Some of the editors who responded to me have been quite helpful. Thank you.

Some have remained constant with the condescending attitude. You see, I'm an intelligent adult, capable of deciding for myself what I feel is useful for me to know. You have absolutely NO right to tell me what I need and don't need to know. If I feel knowledge is useful and important enough to ME to seek answers to my questions, then I deserve the answers. It's not your place to tell me what is useful. Thinking people have a funny way of deciding for themselves what they think is important to them. It's part of that whole "free will" package God endowed us with. Last I checked, none of you are capable of deciding what I think for me, therefore......... well, you get the point.

Again, to teh editors who responded as if I'm on the same level as they (you know... human), I thank you again. If the others treated us in a like manner, we would be much happier.

Hutchenson is a real nice guy!

One of the biggest problems with the project is that an editor only has to edit one site every 4 months. Another problem is editors that have a personal interest in a category!

avengers63 said:

You have absolutely NO right to tell me what I need and don't need to know.

Click to expand...

How do you figure? We've never made a claim that all information on the Open Directory Project is available to anyone who asks. We don't have any "freedom of information" policy. Our guidelines are actually very clear about us not giving out information to the public

But I still think that you're missing the point about why the information would be useless. What good is it going to do for me to tell you that there are currently 10 sites waiting to be reviewed in that category? The editor may not even be looking in that queue. He or she may be working on one of their other categories and may not get back to yours for 6 months. It doesn't mean that someone else might not look at that pile, but there is just no guarantee. I can't predict when a site will be reviewed and I can see the pile. What good will it do for me to tell you how big that pile is? Do you see what I'm saying here?

Help me understand your point here. I want to understand how this information is going to help you. What are you going to do if I tell you that your site is going to be waiting for 6 months?

No one here, including me, was trying to be condescending. BTW My comment about "get on with your life" was meant in all seriousness. I hate to see people banging their heads against the wall about issues that are out of their control, especially when I know that the things that are frustrating them aren't likely to be changing anytime soon.

You have absolutely NO right to tell me what I need and don't need to know. If I feel knowledge is useful and important enough to ME to seek answers to my questions, then I deserve the answers. It's not your place to tell me what is useful.

Click to expand...

I absolutely agree that no one but you can determine what is important to you. But just because you (and this is general "you") feel you need to know something doesn't mean that anyone else is obligated to give you that knowledge. Your right to ask for answers doesn't supercede my or anyone else's right to not give you the answer you're looking for.

Frustration

Can't you folks understand the frustration of being told something that makes NO SENSE. You say get on with you life.

But if the shoe was on the other foot (and I am not rying to hide the fact that this is my situation) would you really feel this way. When you have a site that rivals or surpasses most others in a category in design and usability and you sell a completely unique product and a forum moderator tells you that you were declined for being an affiliate site with no unique content there is a great amount of frustration. You expect us to accept something that appears to fit in no given parameters.

You say we need no more information and should get on with our lives. Because why? Parents say that. You say we need to know no more. In my case I didn't have a single outbound link! Branded an affiliate I should just go away and accept that there is no recourse. I am not trying to make this personal but I think things like this cause a great amount of frustration. When someone receives a puzzling denial you want us to get on with our lives w/o even thinking that we need to know why.

"Because we say so that's why."

Let me try to approach the "information question" from a slightly different perspective. My profession is applied logic. My own concept of "telling the truth" doesn't include citing facts which will lead the hearer to an erroneous conclusion. My own experience as a forum participant tells me that information about queue lengths will lead you to an erroneous conclusion.

I would prefer to give as much information as possible, and it was with unmixed regret that I agreed with the editor consensus to stop giving queue lengths. We tried, we really tried giving that information. It didn't work; however we did it, it invariably raised unrealistic expectations. In effect, we were lying to you. There was no information that we could give. It was all misleading random data.

So we stopped lying, and we will not start again. If you "need" a lie, make one up yourself, or purchase one from a marketroid, but do not ask us for one. There is no truth for us to tell.

But I'll repeat what I said before. Why do YOU ask US for information about your competitors? YOU know, far better than most of us, how many competitors you have. Think of them ALL as in the queue, and calculate your estimated wait based on that. You can also calculate the spam ratio: how many of your competitors inveigle lots of ignorant greedy neophytes into setting up doorway and affiliate pages? Imagine all of them in the queue, waiting to be weeded out, because the editor isn't restricted to reviewed sites. And you can calculate the deceptiveness factor: how well do those spammers conceal the fact that they really don't have any unique good or service to offer, so how long are we going to take to review each site to determine whether or not it's spam.

All of this is more relevant, more accurate, more "true", more useful for making predictions, than anything we can tell you. All of this is information that you have yourself -- Google works for you just as well as it does for us.

If you need the information, do the quantitative research and figure it out. Or read tea leaves, or examine goose entrails, or invent new forms of heparoscopy -- all of those would work better than badgering editors for random numbers. We don't do quant. At all. Ever. Our mission is qualitative review.

What you really want to know is not how long the queues are, but "when will my site be listed?" And the simple fact is, we don't know and can't know. If you really NEED to know that, then ... set your house in order, because you are walking dead.

The ODP cannot by its nature provide some things: cures for cancer, death to dictators, definitions of truth or beauty, and promotional services to webmasters. We hope that the information we provide will be beneficial in many ways unknown to us -- and some of those ways, we know, have commercial impact. But we cannot know exactly how. Perhaps preventing your site from being listed will help one of your competitors survive and provide medical care for his child, who will grow up and find that cure for cancer. Perhaps preventing your site from being listed will encourage you to seek out a productive way of contributing to society, leading to innovative business techniques and a reduced reliance on foreign oil. But WE DON'T KNOW, so we cannot make good decisions based on our estimate of their economic impact on anyone. So ... we don't try. We provide information in the most efficient way we know.

OK, so I was wrong. You didn't get the point.

Perception is reality. If I think fuschia is an nice color, then, for me, fuschia is an nice color. All your protests that it's loud, too bright, or whatever will not change the reality of my preceprion of the color fuschia. The way I think is the way it is for me.

Telling me that there are 10 sites in the cue, but there is no active editor for the category is useful... to me. Telling me that you see absolutely no purpose in my having that knowledge won't change my opinion. I obviously thing it's useful else I'd not be asking. Sure, someone else could jump in and clean up the cue, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it. Any number of things could happen. I'm not concerned with the theoretical, but with the real.

If there's no active editor, then there's no real hope of getting listed until there is. There's then no point in checking the category page every day to see if you're listed. I'd simply check back in a month for an update. If there is an active editor, and 100 in the cue, there's hope. A glimmer of hope is all we need sometimes.

There's a big difference between not being able to change teh situation and fully understanding it. For a great many people, it's a lot easier to be patient when you know what's giong on behind the curtain. "Because I said so" didn't work for us when we were kids, and it doesn't work now.

I'm sure you all can site dozens of examples when a member became belligerent. (I hope I spelled that right!) If they're being polite, there's no excuse to be anything but polite in return. If they get snippy, just don't respond. It takes two people to have an arguement.

You say "It won't do you any good to know". well, I can't stop you from disagreeing with me. I say it won't do me any harm, either. As I've already said, knowledge leads to understanding.

I honestly don't understand how review of submitted sites can not be an important piece of your job. Lets use a restraunt analogy. I come in and place my order. When I ask the waitress about my dinner, she says they're working on it, and to ask again in an hour. Well, that simply won't do, so I get the attention of a higher-up and ask them. They say I don't need to know and tell me to sit down. When I press for answers, he finally tells me that some cooks work on orders, some randomly take meals to people walking by the front doors, and some don't come to work at all. I'm then told that making orders for the people sitting in the dining room isn't the cooks real job anyway, it's to make dinner for anyone walking by who may or may not be hungry. Why do you think tee patron might be mad?

Why, then, do you take submissions if you're not going to do anything with them? There's simply no point. All you're doing is enraging the webmasters who submitted their site in hopes that it would be added. You can brag that 4000 sites are added every day, but that means nothing to us if you're not adding them from our submissions.

Ah, I see the problem now. You're looking at the ODP as a place for webmasters to submit their sites to be listed, but we're looking at the ODP as a directory of web sites that contain useful content for the users. Different perspectives We're not waiting around for webmasters to submit their sites. We go out and look for web sites that we think are appropriate to our categories. As mentioned before the suggested sites pile is another place for us to look, but not the only place. This is why the link at the top of every page says "Suggest URL". We are looking for you to help us wilth your suggestions, we're not waiting for your submissions. It's a big difference. You're looking at this as a service, and we're looking at this as a directory that catalogs web sites. Don't confuse us with the other directories that actually are services for paying customers. That's not us. It's not our mandate.

donaldb said:

Ah, I see the problem now. You're looking at the ODP as a place for webmasters to submit their sites to be listed, but we're looking at the ODP as a directory of web sites that contain useful content for the users.

Click to expand...

Perhaps I'm just not understanding the defination of wembaster. I thought that if woy designed, posted, and own a website, then you're a webmaster. I don't see a definitave difference between an e-commerce site owner and the author of a blog. If you have teh final say in teh content of a web page, then, to me, you're a webmaster. By all rights, the WM would be the first one to suggest the site for review, so they're the ones you'd be dealing with.

If my understanding of the term is incorrect, please, what is the correct defination?

But anyone that actually reads the notice on the outside of the restaurant has no right to be mad.

All meals are free, you do not have to pay.
It's against the policy of this restaurant for patrons to tip the waiter.
We can refuse to serve meals to anyone, without any reason.
We like cooking meals our way, don't tell us how to cook.
We choose what kind of meals we think suitable to serve here.
f you want gourmet food, go down the street and pay for it.
We don't serve fast food that looks the same at every restaurant.
Patrons may not come into the kitchen and see how we cook.
We take as long as we feel appropriate to cook a meal.
By entering this restaurant, you agree to our terms, and agree to not argue about them. Excessive arguments may lead to banning from the restaurant, as it makes the cooks unhappy, and we like to have fun here.

If there's no active editor, then there's no real hope of getting listed until there is.

Click to expand...

That is absolutely incorrect. Thousands of sites get added every single day in categories where there is no named editor. In fact, the majority of the sites added on a daily basis are added by editors who have high level permissions and are editing in categories where they are not named.

A real life example from yesterday. I added more than 100 sites in more than 20 categories were I was not hte named editor. And that type of activity (though not the volume, I was taking a mental health day from work) happens every single day. I didn't plan to add those sites, I didn't know I was going to be working in those categories -- it just happened. This, there is not a logic or predictive model that would give any submitter even a tiny clue that there was going to be activity in those seemingly-editorless categories.

Why, then, do you take submissions if you're not going to do anything with them?

Click to expand...

No one said that. We said that working on submissions is not our highest priority. Oh, we keep an eye on the "greens" as we call them, and we'll eventually get to every submission. We just refuse to be driven by them.

You can brag that 4000 sites are added every day, but that means nothing to us if you're not adding them from our submissions.

Click to expand...

That is simply laughable. An add is an add is an add. It does not matter where it came from. If we add 4,000 sites that were not submitted, we've probably made 4,000 webmasters happy. Very happy. They just got a Christmas present. So your next door neighbor just won the lottery, and you didn't. So you want to change the lottery so that you will win next time. It's not going to happen.

No where in the public documentation for ODP does it promise anyone a listing. That is a fact.

No where in the public documentation for ODP does it promise a timeline for a website review.
That is a fact.

No where in the public documentation for ODP does it promise a higher priority for submitted sites.
That is a fact.

No where in the public documentation for ODP does it restrict where we will get the sites we add to the directory.
That is a fact.

A glimmer of hope is all we need sometimes.

Click to expand...

Here is it: we will review your site eventually.

Bad use of words on my part. Substitute "submitter" for "webmaster". We're not sitting around waiting for anyone to submit their web sites for listing. We have nothing against the billions of people who have web sites or any commercial or non-profit webmasters, we just are not limiting ourselves to looking in the "Suggested URL" queues in the ODP. If we look in the que, then we look in the que - it's just not our only source of listable web sites.

Personally I find a lot of URLs watching TV shows, reading local newspapers, and general web surfing. Those are the URLs that I list as they are the ones that catch my eye. Sometimes I look in the unreviewed que of my chosen categories, but I end up getting depressed with all of the junk that's been submitted in there, so I close it up again and go look elsewhere.

And FTR, webmasters are not the only people who suggest sites. Many people stumble on the ODP and end up submitting their personal web site, and their friend's business sites, and grandma's sewing club's site etc. Those end up being the ones that we like to list. They have no ulterior motive. They just want to help the directory grow.

And I went to a store in my town a couple of weeks ago, was impressed with the service, found their web site was not in ODP in the Regional category. Wrote a description, and sent it to that category, since I can't edit it directly. The next day another editor saw that my "suggestion" was waiting there and added it.

And surprisingly that categroy does not even have an editor

bobrat said:

We can refuse to serve meals to anyone, without any reason.

Click to expand...

That's BS in any situation. Doesn't require a response.

And to think, this thread started in large part due to a critique of your attitude. Anyone that goes through these posts will see your attitudes rear their ugly heads.

You have unfortunately become too important commercially to take the attitude you take. If you want the problems to go away ask the Search Engines to give all of your pages a Page Rank of 0 in their algorithms or to ignore them. Inclusion in DMOZ would still be beneficial as would aid inclusion in other directories and on other searches. This could help de-commercialize your fine hobby.

As it is now you are too important to take the attitude you take. Perhaps you are similar to an athlete who, thrust into the mainstream must modify his behaviour as he has become a role model. He never asked for that but the money comes from somewhere.

You get exposure and traffic b/c of your commercial importance. If you want to take the elitist approach you take fine. Give up some of the "money."

I'm not concerned with the theoretical, but with the real.

Click to expand...

And we are trying to provide you with the real.

Here are some real facts:

- An editor listed in a category does not indicate that that editor edits actively in that category.

- A category with no editor listed does not indicate that the category is not being actively edited.

- Activity in a category today is no indication that the activity will continue tomorrow.

- Inactivity in a category today is no indication that there won't be activity tomorrow.

- An individual editor who is very active today is no indication that that particular individual will be active tomorrow.

- An individual editor who is not active today is no indication that they won't be active tomorrow.

- Editing activity is not dispersed uniformly across the directory. (Some categories get more attention than other categories, day-to-day and over time.)

- The rate of editing activity within a particular area is not constant. (Sometimes there will be a lot of editing in a short period of time, sometimes hardly any for a long period of time.)

- Editing activity consists of more than just reviewing site suggestions. (Cleaning up descriptions, removing listed junk, improving organization and category linking, adding listings found via other sources, etc.)

I can provide specific examples to the above, if it would help. What all of that is saying is no one can predict when, where, how much, and what type of editing activity is going to occur on any given day or over time. As I said earlier, I can't say what I'm going to work on day-to-day. If individuals can't predict what they themselves are going to do in the near future, how can we even pretend to know what is going to happen in any particular area of the directory? All we can say is that editing activity does occur every day across the entire directory and that we grow by 3000-4000 listings a day.

So back to wanting an answer about the number of unreviewed. With the above information, can you understand that whether the unreviewed in a particular category is 2 or 200, there is no correlation to predicting how long it will be for it to be reviewed? This isn't a business who's job it is to review submissions. We don't have a "first in, first out" review system. We don't have a schedule of editor activity, nor do we direct where editors edit.

If we were a business that had the above items, then yes, there would be some correlation of time to review and number of sites in the pool. But since we aren't, yet so many people presume we are, providing the number of sites waiting sets up unrealistic and erroneous expectations.

We want to provide people reading this forum with real information. Yes, the number of sites waiting for review in a particular category is a real number. But any conclusions drawn from that number are false. As hutcheson said we don't want to mislead people on this forum. And since people inevitably try to draw a conclusion about review time based on the number of sites in the pool, we stopped providing that information.

In other words, we can either lie or say we don't know. We don't want to lie, but most people don't seem to want to accept that we don't know.