Safeguard Question

I asked this question in another thread, but I think that it would be more appropriately posted here.

Suppose that someone else was submitting my site from time to time in other categories... This effectively takes me off of one list and puts me at the bottom of another. If someone were to keep doing this about every month, then they pretty much have maliciously prevented me from ever getting listed in DMOZ.

Is there any safeguard against that?

Well firstly submitting to a category does not remove a site from wherever it has already been suggested. It does mean there are multiple submissions waiting though.

submitting to the same category overwrites the date, but since sites are not listed in a particular order ( We can choose Title, URL, date, reverse date order for instance) being listed is never going to be delayed forever - even the worst pools get cleaned out sometimes.

I'm working on one set of categories at the momemt which has sites from the last 4 years, one of the ones I listed was submitted 2 weeks ago, whilst I have left others from 2 years ago to go back to as they are going to take longer and/or need to be moved to where they should have been submitted in the first place

So don't get hung up on date order, it's one sort order, thats all.
:tree:

Also, submission in another category does not automatically remove submissions from other categories.

No, but the concern here, if you look at the poster's other thread, is that some malicious person keeps submitting a competitor's site to another category, and an editor looking for duplicate unreviewed starts going through and randomly pruning, and the site never gets attention in the category where it should probably get listed.

I think it's a bit unlikely, as a scenario, personally.

First, malicious submittals are not unknown, although they are very rare. There was one rabid perp last year -- we never figured out his motive, nor the way he chose his victims. But I could count all of the incidents I've seen on the fingers of one hand. And that's in what, 60,000 edits? (Lots more common are stone-cold-brain-dead submitters, and the software developers who sell these clever programs that submit every page on your site ... daily. But it's been about a year since I saw one of those either. I think people figured out they didn't work.)

The only definite effect of such malicious submittal would be:
(1) to make sure the site really is submitted -- which isn't malicious,
(2) to make sure the site is treated last when sites are reviewed in date order, which is not the normal order anyway -- and editors don't have to follow any order. (I basically never follow a predictable order -- I just cast my eye over the list and pick an interesting-looking description, then do several sites until I hit an uninteresting one, then start over.)
(3) to keep you from asking about its status. and I've never seen a case of this confirmed. Of course, it will take awhile to see one, if there is 1 case in 20,000 (as the other statistics would suggest.) And it really isn't that big a deal -- those cases would be swamped by the 1 in 100 EDITOR error rate (again, my approximation based on a sampling of my edits and these forum posts).

You're more likely to win a hundred thousand dollar lottery ticket than to have to deal with issues like these. You're MUCH more likely to get the NIMDA worm, or have an automobile accident. You're much more likely, in fact, to die tomorrow. So ... this really isn't something to worry about.

hutcheson said:

You're more likely to win a hundred thousand dollar lottery ticket than to have to deal with issues like these. You're MUCH more likely to get the NIMDA worm, or have an automobile accident. You're much more likely, in fact, to die tomorrow. So ... this really isn't something to worry about.

Click to expand...

I wonder if my chances of winning one hundred thousand dollars is better than my chances of getting the NIMDA worm. I sure hope that it is better than the chance I will die tomorrow..

Anyway, thank you do much for your detailed response. It puts things in perspective. Sometimes a littel paranioa is a good thing but sometimes it just gets out of control.