OK, I understand the essence of what you are trying to convey, but I do need to help clear up some misconceptions.
ranks not shown till a site shows say 1000 votes - it would solve this whole mess
Simply put, we are a directory, not a ranking and rating service. What you are proposing would be a nightmare to implement and would not really do anything other than to open our system up to even more abuse. I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, but this is something that other have proposed (internally and externallt) in teh past and it simply causes more problems than it solves.
ost of the adult & many of the non-adult categories have no editors
That is both right and wrong. Certainly the vastg majority of categories have no listed editor, but that does not mean there is no editor. Any editor in the categories above can and do edit in categories below. I'm a pretty good example, fewer than 1% of my total edits are in categories where I am the named editor.
What you are really pointing out is that we (ODP) have a communications problem. We primarily use the public naming of editors as a recruitment tool, and encourage editors to resign from lower categories when they receive higheer permission so as to not discourage potential applicants. I (personally) see two big problems with this. First, it conveys the erroneous impression that there are categories that have been editorially abandoned, and second, it sets expectations for people to apply to categories where there is absolutely no chance that a new editor would be accepted. you've helped clarify my thinking on this and I will begin an internal discussion on this very topic.
I've been waiting almost eight months now and will pretty soon (very soon) be too broke to keep these online
An ODP listing is not a "silver bullet" that will instantly lead to wealth and fame for a webmaster. It is simply a web directory. There are hundreds of other site promotion opportunities out there that are not payment based, and frankly, you need to pursue them. Sometimes in life, if you cannot get on the express elevator, you need to take the local and put up with slower progress to the top. Taken another way, you are really complaining that a totally free service which requires no substantial effort on your part, is not fast enough for your linking.
the "spammed" categories that have no editors are exactly the ones that so desperately need updating - what is the longest that this may take?
It takes from a few hours to more than two years. No category is totally without editors, it is just that many editors go through a decision making process along these lines: do I go to spammy category A and spend two hours adding maybe one quality site to the directory, or do I go to a nice topical or regional category and add two dozen quality sites in the next two hours? That, my friend, is a personal decision that hundreds of editors face every single day.
You happen to be in an industry (adult) that has shown little or no ethics or respect with regards to this directory. Thousands or tens of thousands of duplicate submissions, mirrors, redirects, bogus URL, etc. Is it no wonder that so many volunteer editors voluntarily choose not to edit there or apply for permissions to edit there? Sure, ther are a few honest adult websites, but the signal to noise ratio is so high that many editors simply cannot be bothered. We volunteered to build a directory and help the web community, not to spend hours sorting thorugh spam and deal with sleazy webmaster tricks.
haveing major chunks of the directory with no updates (and worse yet sites that are just spam or even dead) is destroying the quality of this directory
Exactly, which is why we keep our standards high and we work very hard at ridding the directory of sites that have turned into garbage. That's why we don't just jump into an adult category and approve everything that has been waiting. That's why we do a lot of work that is invisible to the general public, and doesn't show up as page updates, but adds quality to the directory.
To give you a bit of perspective, I've spent about 30 hours online with ODP in the last week. I spent a few hours cleanign up some deadlinks that were identified by one of our tools, and the rest of the time I've been doing work that absolutely no one can see. There is a special category that I believe needs to be developed and I have been working in a non-public part of the directory, building and rebuilding what I think the directory needs. I've created structure, and then torn down structure, I've tried groupings, and wiped it all out and started over again. I've go somethign about 2/3rds built, but I'm not sure that I've got it right (in my own mind). I've invested this work knowing that when I make a posting in the internal disucssion channels, and ask for comments, I may well get totally blasted out of the water, my peers may think it is the stupidest idea since "new Coke" and the hours I will have invested will not change a single bit in the directory -- but the time will not have been wasted, because this is exactly the type of contributions we want from our editors. We don't want editors who think their job is to monitor a submission pool and process submissions.
in my opinion something needs to be done to speed up the reviews of sites & get rid of junk sites that surfers regret clicking on
Well, we have a reporting mechanism within this forum that is quite heavily used to report problem sites -- and those reports get a very high priority and are dealt with faster than most any other type of issue.
As far as spam goes -- I don't think you'd like my plan for dealing with it: I think we should simply turn off submissions and never turn them back on again. We really and truly don't need submissions and no submissions means no spam. Sure, the diretory might have slightly slower growth (then again, maybe not since with no spam editors are free to edit and build out categories). But fear not, no one is going to adopt my plan.
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