Should you Resubmit?

Ella · Nov 6, 2006

I submitted one site back in Oct. 2005 and another in April 2006. I understand you can not provide any status, but can you resubmit? The website says don't do this, but after a year, what should I do? Can I do anything? Will I ever be listed? Very

!

Thank you.

giz · Nov 6, 2006

If it hasn't been reviewed, a re-suggest makes it look like it hasn't been waiting very long when it is actually looked at. You might want to avoid that, by not re-suggesting.

If it has already been rejected then we don't need to review it again - unless several years have passed and the site has changed by a very large amount and now does not do whatever it was that meant it was not eligible for inclusion last time.

If the site has been reviewed and moved to another category for re-review by another editor, then the editor of the original category does not need to see the suggestion again, only to have to move it again.

So, no, don't re-suggest the site.

If however your site is eligible for a "Regional" listing, or has content in another language (NOT machine translated!) then another suggestion to that other category might be acceptable.

Ella · Nov 6, 2006

I was just trying to read some old posts on this topic. If I understand things correctly, I have no way of knowing if the site was reviewed, is that correct? I actually did see that DMOZ editors were at my first site I believe in Jan. of 2006 (just a fluke that I picked up on that) but other than that I have no info on anything else. I do not fall into the categories you mentioned about resubmitting and my first website is for a single product line so there should be no reason that I can see to send this to another editor.

So once again if I understand you (and the other posts) correctly, I will never receive any notification at all, none once reviewed and none once added to the site - if either of those events take place at all? So I guess all I can do is light a candle once a week and pray to the DMOZ Gods.

Thank you.

hutcheson · Nov 6, 2006

Yes, there's no notification (other than if the site is listed, the world can see it.)

As for the DMOZ gods, I tend to be a bit athiestic. A little Nietzschean self-reliance is called for. You've done what you can to help the ODP mission and it's time to work on YOUR mission -- a purpose for which the ODP has made no provision.

samluo · Nov 8, 2006

Ella said:
I submitted one site back in Oct. 2005 and another in April 2006. I understand you can not provide any status, but can you resubmit? The website says don't do this, but after a year, what should I do? Can I do anything? Will I ever be listed? Very !

Thank you.

Are there some one can contact the managers or technicians of the dmoz.org?
I think the website not very friendly to submitors, why can not see the status of their submitting from website? It is very easy to reach the goal from technique,
And when resubmitting, why there is no alert tell the submitor the site is processing and can not be resubmited again?
And the Dmoz seems ignore the pain of long time waiting for submitors.I know sites are viewed by volunteers, but not have a good policy to keep equality and efficience to submitors.

hutcheson · Nov 8, 2006

>Are there some one can contact the managers or technicians of the dmoz.org?

Saying what? Is there something you think you know, that you think they don't already know? I can tell you that the AOL administrators did not even care for the idea of giving submittal status in the forum (as we used to do). They thought it sent the wrong message. They thought it would make people think that the ODP was about giving equal services to submitters. And that is the idea we most truly do not want to give.

But the ODP is volunteers, and some of us volunteers wanted to try to give status information to submitters. We were wrong. We found out that every single kind of information we could give was nearly always misused, and that nothing we could tell honest people could ever help them.

>I think the website not very friendly to submitors, why can not see the status of their submitting from website? It is very easy to reach the goal from technique, And when resubmitting, why there is no alert tell the submitor the site is processing and can not be resubmited again?

Check out the "No more status checks" post in the Announcements forum. It's been translated into Chinese, which may reduce the confusion. That is the result of our experience.

>I know sites are viewed by volunteers, but not have a good policy to keep equality and efficience to submitors.

The ODP had a choice here. It could have task priorities chosen by volunteer editors (who asked to be trusted, and offered credentials to support their request) or it could have task priorities chosen by submitters (who are not required to show any evidence of trustworthiness or public spirit.) The right decision seems obvious already.

But matters were even simpler: because Yahoo was already doing it the other way.

So now, thanks to that sensible decision, EVERYONE has a choice.

If you want priorities chosen by users who are trusted surfers -- check out the ODP.

If you want priorities chosen by customers who are webmasters -- check out Yahoo.

Choose for yourself which site you want to visit. But you can choose only for yourself: everyone else is free to make their own choice also!

Ella · Nov 9, 2006

Thanks for the response. As I wrote the last message I already realized that I need to move on and do what I have to do and DMOZ will come along in its own time. (Hopefully.)

anjordan77 · Nov 10, 2006

I think basically the way dmoz works is that you submit your site and then you get put into a very long pain staking line that contains lots of spam sites and lots of misplaced websites(only 30% are placed in the right category).

So if you submit your website again you are instantly put in the back of the line again. Of course if you submitted a year ago i would think that's plenty of time to visit the website and confirm it as a yay or nay for that category, but if they had to move it to another category it might have to go back into line of websites to be reviewed. I wish i could join the team in my area to expedite things since i have lots of free time.

It would be nice to get an email once someone's website has been reviewed and get a generic email that states either, your website has been approved by dmoz or your website was turned down by dmoz typical reasons for being turned down are...spam site, wrong category, multiple listings, etc.

samluo · Nov 13, 2006

hutcheson said:
>Are there some one can contact the managers or technicians of the dmoz.org?

Saying what? Is there something you think you know, that you think they don't already know? I can tell you that the AOL administrators did not even care for the idea of giving submittal status in the forum (as we used to do). They thought it sent the wrong message. They thought it would make people think that the ODP was about giving equal services to submitters. And that is the idea we most truly do not want to give.

But the ODP is volunteers, and some of us volunteers wanted to try to give status information to submitters. We were wrong. We found out that every single kind of information we could give was nearly always misused, and that nothing we could tell honest people could ever help them.

>I think the website not very friendly to submitors, why can not see the status of their submitting from website? It is very easy to reach the goal from technique, And when resubmitting, why there is no alert tell the submitor the site is processing and can not be resubmited again?

Check out the "No more status checks" post in the Announcements forum. It's been translated into Chinese, which may reduce the confusion. That is the result of our experience.

>I know sites are viewed by volunteers, but not have a good policy to keep equality and efficience to submitors.

The ODP had a choice here. It could have task priorities chosen by volunteer editors (who asked to be trusted, and offered credentials to support their request) or it could have task priorities chosen by submitters (who are not required to show any evidence of trustworthiness or public spirit.) The right decision seems obvious already.

But matters were even simpler: because Yahoo was already doing it the other way.

So now, thanks to that sensible decision, EVERYONE has a choice.

If you want priorities chosen by users who are trusted surfers -- check out the ODP.

If you want priorities chosen by customers who are webmasters -- check out Yahoo.

Choose for yourself which site you want to visit. But you can choose only for yourself: everyone else is free to make their own choice also!

Hello hutcheson,

Thanks for your explanation, but here are some misunderstandings.

Regarding the Dmoz.org,

1. I never mind close the inquire forum, but I just hope there will be a server program to list the status automatically when submitors input their domain name.
As we know , there are three status: listed, rejected or waiting, it is very easy to inquire from the database from technique.
why no such a page to let editors inquire themselves ?
It is fool to inquire the status from editors in forums.

2. when somebody resubmit , the web should remind submitor the domain has in progress and told them do not resubmit again.

All these are easy in technique.

I wonder why such a famous directory site do not have such simple functions, absolutely a joke.

hutcheson · Nov 13, 2006

The main reason why such functions are not available is that ... nobody needs them for any honest purpose.

Editors don't need them. People who follow the submittal policies don't need them.

However, I don't want to leave you with the impression that your opinions on database design were not challenged because they were correct. In fact, you possess neither the technical competance nor the information to make that judgment, and so your opinion, one way or the other, is simply irrelevant -- nobody, neither us nor you, will ever act on it.

chaos127 · Nov 13, 2006

there are three status: listed, rejected or waiting

You can already tell if a site is listed, so the only other information would be between 'waiting' and 'rejected'. How would telling people which category their site is in help the directoy? In both cases, there's no point in suggesting the site again (unless it's changed significantly after it was first suggested -- in which case we probably won't mind an additional suggestion even if it is still waiting to be reviewed). People suggesting sites can already tell if their sites are listable under the editing guidelines, since documents are freely available. On the other hand letting spammers know which of their unlistable sites we've detected as such (and hence rejected) would be quite useful information for them to have, and therefore bad for the directory. This idea has been discussed many times on this forum, and the fact that it has yet to be implemented suggests that editors do not see it as beneficial to the directory. I've given some reasons above, but you might like to search the forum, or read the FAQ for more...

it is very easy to inquire from the database from technique.

My understanding of the ODP's data storage suggests that it would not actually easy to do this at all.

when somebody resubmit, the web should remind submitor the domain has in progress and told them do not resubmit again.

An interesting idea, although I'm not sure whether it would be technically feasible with our current setup. However, would this actually help the directory? If we were to prevent multiple submission altogether, we'd almost certainly loose suggestions of sites which can be listed in more than one place (eg Regional/Topical, or World for multipole languages) and we'd probably see an increase in people to submiting their site under different URLs (which would mean more editor time spent checking for this). If we did allow multiple submissions, then the people who cause the problems with mass multiple submissions would presumably continue to do so. All in all, I don't see implementing something like this to be particularly beneficial, and certainly not priority for the ODP's technical people.

Should you Resubmit?

Ella

Member

giz

Member

Ella

Member

hutcheson

samluo

Member

hutcheson

Ella

Member

anjordan77

Member

samluo

Member

hutcheson

chaos127