Some Ideas

Ideas in improvment of Becoming an Editor process:
1. Send back to user all filled field's of application form.
2. Give the possibility to track the status of application form through the web.

Ideas in improvment of Site Submission process:
1. Send confirmation letter with all data to the user.
2. Give the possibility to track the site submission status.
3. Allow editing of the site submission form after submission and before the editor will view it.

And:
Add the button "Report bad link" to DMOZ pages.

My responses:

"1. Send back to user all filled field's of application form."
Sounds like a good idea.

"2. Give the possibility to track the status of application form through the web."
We currently have this forum to do that. I'm unsure whether an automated system is planned.

"1. Send confirmation letter with all data to the user."
Again, a good suggestion, however many submitters do not give correct email addresses (I've seen submissions with 'nospam@nospam.com' - very useful if you need to contact the submitter for whatever reason).

"2. Give the possibility to track the site submission status."
Again, this can be done through this forum. An automated system may come along eventually but I don't think it is planned for the immediate future.

"3. Allow editing of the site submission form after submission and before the editor will view it."
If you want to change the title or description of a submission, just resubmit to that category, and the existing one should be overwritten. If you want to submit to another category, just go and do that. One or two duplicate submissions will not penalise you as a spammer.

"Add the button "Report bad link" to DMOZ pages."
I think we may well be adding this. There is a lot of support for it in the editor community. You can use the Update URL feature for this already (with 'This site has closed' as the reason) but 'Report Dead Link' sticks out more.

We'll post your ideas in the internal forums, to see how feasable they are.

Those are some good ideas acropelius. With regards to - Add the button "Report bad link" to DMOZ pages. - something along these lines will hopefully rolled out soon.

"2. Give the possibility to track the site submission status."

The main reason why this is highly unlikely to be implemented is that it would make it much easier for the spammers to target the ODP - they could see immediately when their application had been rejected and reapply straight away to another category or with their content on a different URL.

I particularly like "Send back to user all filled field's of application form." I know that it doesn't occur to many applicants to save the information, and I think the person would be more likely to reapply if rejected, if they had their original information.

Thanks! <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Agreed - that's a good idea. <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" alt="" />

Well by going through the forum i have found that if a site is re-submitted ( after once it has been submitted and is under review) it gets under que once again and the submission done earlier will be over written. If this is the case, many people may think of submitting their competitor's site themselves and thus forcing a delay for the competitor's site to be listed. An appropriate solution must be sought out to over come this problem.

Regards
RaviSimpi

RaviSimpi, I notice in other threads that you have applied to become an editor - first of all - thank you for volunteering - I hope your application is successful!

If you get accepted into the Editing Community you'll start to see some of the things that we are faced with day-to-day. You rapidly realise that there are no easy ways of dealing with the sort of volume of submissions that we have.

So we reach compromises, and most of what has been done in terms of spam detection and protection are compromises - they are never going to be foolproof.

The other thing which you will notice if you are accepted is that submitters obsess WAY too much about their "position in the queue". Believe me, the best way to get listed soon is to submit ONCE to the correct category with a title and description which follow the ODP guidelines. Those stand out to editors when they look at the list of unreviewed sites, and it is usually THOSE that get processed first.

If I saw in a category the following two sites:

"Acme Widget Company"
"Manufactures and distributes widgets to the Frimble industry. Includes product catalog, a history of widgets and online ordering"

or

"We make the BEST Widgets in the WORLD!!!!!!"
"Blue widgets, redd widgets, evrey type of widget U can imagine AND MORE!!!! Buy the bessssst widgets from US."

I know which one I would pick to review first....

(And I am only barely making this stuff up!)

So before making statements like "a solution must be sought out", I suggest you get a better understanding of these issues.

Thanks

Wow alucard!!!

I appologize.
I recently used an almost exact example of your Widget site in another thread

I hope I don't owe royalties

I swear the concept was reversed engineered and I had no intention of copying your widget description.

I got it. I have read the guidelines and went deeper into demoz faqs. And one thing i agree what ODP says "HUMANS do it better"

Well here is another small bunch of ideas.
1. If a site is already submitted and someone re submits it again, an error message must be displayed mentioning that the website the user is trying to submit has already been submitted. And if possible a link named 'details' must be provided which must lead to complete details of submission. And also the link to this forum must be displayed saying that the user can get the current status here.
2. After successful submission of any website, along with the message 'Submission Received' the link to this forum should be provides saying that the user can check the submission status here.

How many sites do you think get submitted every day to the ODP? I have a funny feeling that RZ might get completely overwhelmed if we invited everyone to check their status here. It bears no relation to how quickly your site gets listed and the vast majority of the service provided here is a voluntary effort to calm the nerves of stressed webmasters and to repeat a small number of simple rules.

Keep in mind that this forum is unofficial. It's run by ODP editors but it isn't a part of the ODP, Netscape, or AOL/TW therefore you aren't likely to see links to it appearing on official ODP pages.

Got it.
But atleast when the website is re-submitted the user must get a message "The website you are trying to submit is already submitted."

Ravi, even though the editing side of DMOZ is down, the editor forums are still up. The question you raise has been discussed many times in the fora and, rather than posting all the answers here, I would suggest you go there, do a forum search and read the long debates about the pros and cons of doing this.

Thanks.

I have a funny feeling that RZ might get completely overwhelmed

Click to expand...

Not likely that would happen. We got major horsepower under the hood and the pipe it runs through is kept greased.

Unless of course your talking about stressing the ones that are kind enough to check a sites status. Now that is a real possibility.

Unless of course your talking about stressing the ones that are kind enough to check a sites status. Now that is a real possibility.

Click to expand...

That's what I interpreted it to be. The Submission Status forum would be swamped - yes, the hardware may be able to cope but I don't think the humans using it would be.

Yes, that's what I meant.

totalxsive said:

"1. Send confirmation letter with all data to the user."
Again, a good suggestion, however many submitters do not give correct email addresses (I've seen submissions with 'nospam@nospam.com' - very useful if you need to contact the submitter for whatever reason).

Click to expand...

...whats about Double Opt-In - like to register in this forum?

I really, really like to see some confirmation letter - at the end it would reduce some work for the editors, because submitter can better reproduce what, where and when they submitted their sites and prevent double submissions.

greetings - maruan.

But we also rely on the casual web surfer who finds an interesting web site and suggests it to the directory. We would never expect them to have to register just to make a suggestion.