someone has removed my listing last night, please reinstate

There are plenty of categories full of sleazy sites that would be illegal somewhere. Editors are not forced to edit any site or any category, one of the basic principles by which we operate. Therefore most editors vote with their keyboards and don't edit in those sleazy categories. Every so often a brave soul might don some rubber gloves and go in with a bottle of bleach and clean them up a little. Anyone who runs a business that relies on a DMOZ listing as an essential element in the plan is asking to be bankrupt within a few months. And it cannot ever be a consideration in an editing decision.

Why do we have these categories? It was probably not planned - sufficient sites arrived on a particular subject, an editor had the will to list them, the category was created and the sites listed. Once that one editor with the will moves on if no-one else is interested then the category stays how it was except for dead-heading hijacks and 404's etc.

There is a continuum here. Courtesy is thinking about the effect of your actions on another person -- well, actually, pretending to think of it.

Discourtesy is ignoring the pretense. But that isn't the other end of the spectrum. The other end is sociopathy -- that is, thinking of the effect of your actions in order to manipulate.

The appropriate response to a sociopath isn't "courtesy" it is indifference. Explicit, absolute, non-negotiable refusal to be manipulated. What, to a normal person, would be courtesy is, to a sociopath, a weakness to be manipulated.

We have a fair number of sociopathic visitors here. Sometimes there is a very clear pattern -- you can see it in a chain of posts that push in turn a list of disconnected emotional buttons. You can see it in demands for everyone else to live up to standards that the poster obviously considers inoperative in his own personal behavior. You can see it in demands for others to show the kind of interest in his interests that the poster is clearly doesn't have in others' interests. And in almost every case, where you see something that seems rude, you can trace its cause back to an attempt, and usually a pattern of attempts, to manipulate.

True Hutchison- but - the way that the answer is delivered is also important as to how the public perceives the odp. In other words- conduct should be exemplary. The public isn't usually privy to the other exchanges.
In the long run, courtesy is always better.

how the public perceives the odp

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It is more important that the public understands the ODP properly than gets a false perception as a result of taking courtesy as encouragement. So when you come here you can usually expect blunt answers. It is a basic fact of editing that an editor can never ever take the webmaster's business or personal finances into account when making a listing or delisting decision - it must be based purely on the eligibility of the site.

Pushing emotional buttons like my kids will starve if you don't list me, the bank will foreclose on my mortgage if you don't list me, I am disabled and my affiliate travel site is the only way I can pay my medical bills, I am 80 and on a pension, all these and more have and will be tried here to try and make editors look like uncaring monsters and the webmaster appear a deserving case in the public perception. But we don't judge webmasters - hence the categories for dubious and sleazy business models that stink from a mile away despite their borderline legality. We judge high quality unique content on websites - if you've got it then one day you will be listed, if not then we are simply not interested regardless of the webmaster and the personal and business problems that are really nothing to do with us. If you build a business case that relies on a DMOZ listing you are a fool.

The time we spend dealing with spam and other submissions, including those that have been listed at some point, but which are in breach of our guidelines, which are available to all, takes up maybe 60-70% of many editors' time. Time that could be spent on listing the many millions of sites that do meet our guidelines and that we are very happy to list. So we are not overly tolerant of those who waste our time, which is unpaid and generally unappreciated, and a blunt response is probably far more polite than what the editor is actually thinking as they are replying. Remember that we are not customer service reps paid to listen to crap all day and respond with sorry but have a nice day. What surprises me is the level of tolerance shown by good honest webmasters towards those who clog up the DMOZ unreviewed site pools - they are the reason why their own sites are still awaiting review and not listed.

What you don't see because the cases never arise here, are the hundreds of thousands of webmasters whose sites do meet guidelines and that are listed annually, many of them within days of submission. Good, high quality original sites with material of interest to editors and to our users. Sometimes when they are borderline - good unique concept but some key thing missing an editor will go out of their way to tell the webmaster of their omission or if not then they hold onto the submission until the owner works it out themselves. But there are plenty of markets, and fake IDs are one of those along with online casinos and travel agencies and real estate in some countries, where the last thing we want to do is to encourage resubmission of a rejected site after the owner has hidden the offending element away from an editor. Courtesy has its place, straight talking can be more effective though.

texasville said:

... - but - the way that the answer is delivered is also important as to how the public perceives the odp. In other words- conduct should be exemplary. The public isn't usually privy to the other exchanges.
In the long run, courtesy is always better.

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I agree with you 100%. I really don't understand why someone can't reply politely.

oneeye said:

Courtesy has its place, straight talking can be more effective though.

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Straight talking is fine as long as it's not rude. Telling someone that their web site doesn't stand a chance of ever being listed because it doesn't meet any of the listing criteria with a link to the guidelines is different than telling them just to go away and stop bugging us.

Personally, I think that there are a lot of rude posts in this forum and many of them are made by editors, but I've given up trying to change things because I seem to be in the minority.

I do.

Have it your way donald, please remove my login from this forum.

:tree:

I think a large issue for the bickering from both sides is the nature of this forum unfortunately.

A webmaster has a site listed or submits, the wait is tough and loosing a listing is even tougher so they come here to see what is going on. the same response is given to all that "we no longer do stats", fair enough but then frustration builds with the webmaster (been there done that) and comments are made. No direction but bad or ending it early, and it seems its hard to end it when you have no answers.

The second part is the editors will not give info, and I am very sure they are sick of answering and that also causes remarks that are uncalled for and woul make the webmaster increasingly frustrated and the wheel turns.

There may not be a solution but hopefully webmasters will spend the time to read though some posts such as this and understand no good can come from requesting information here, just frustration and some remarks you do not want to here.

Take it from me, I killed my chances of being in the directory by letting my emotions roll, and remember there is no penalty to editors, just webmasters so do not start a fight you you can not win.

Cheers,
Chris

Ctrenks, you are very right. What I just can't understand is why people don't read things like FAQ, threads marked "read this first" or the guidelines before the ask questions or suggest a site. If they did it would make live for them (and us) much easier. But as I also see in real-life a lot of people seem to think that everything in the world is only there to fullfill their whishes and it must be done at this moment. They just can't understand that not everybody works and thinks according to this principle.

I killed my chances of being in the directory by letting my emotions roll,

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Don't worry, postings made here at R-Z have no influence on the chance of a website being listed (2 exceptions: bribery will get you and all your sites banned and legal threats will put all your sites on wait until you settled matters through AOL lawyers). No positive influence and also no negative influence. If a site is listable we will list it (I just don't know when )

>> We don't care. <<

>> ...rude <<

What you all fail to realise, is that the answer was translated from the original Dutch by the poster - and while you may see an "attitude" in that answer, there was probably none intended by the poster.

The Dutch answer may have been closer to "it is not something we can consider", or "we cannot take that into account", or "that has to be ignored", or "it is not a factor", or "we cannot care for that", or "we do not care". You see, they all mean similar things - and to a native English speaker, a tone might be detected by the reader, but it may be one that simply was not present for the poster.

Something to consider when there are editors from over 200 countries contributing to all parts of the project.

There are people with genuine queries who may have made errors and they should always be given the benefit of the doubt and treated with a degree of courtesy. I agree that sometimes this does not happen and I have cringed occasionally. There are others that transgress the guidelines and abuse the facility offered by DMOZ to suggest a site deliberately and with malice aforethought and editors can see the evidence for this. They don't deserve anyone's courtesy or sympathy in my opinion.

giz said:

What you all fail to realise, is that the answer was translated from the original Dutch by the poster - and while you may see an "attitude" in that answer, there was probably none intended by the poster.

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I'm always the first person to stand up and tell the native English speaker to be very, very careful with expressions that may not translate well into other languages - I've mentioned this a number of times in this forum. So I think the reverse should be true. If you are trying to answer a question and English is not your first language, then you should be extra careful that you are very clear about what you are trying to say.

If you don't think your response is going to translate well in either direction then maybe reconsider replying to the question until someone who speaks the language can answer it. I appreciate people wanting to help by answering, but you may be doing more harm if your answer comes across as rude.

For the most part, I don't think that language barriers have been a big problem on this forum. I think that people are generally doing a good job at making themselves understood.

oneeye said:

They don't deserve anyone's courtesy or sympathy in my opinion.

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I agree that they don't deserve sympathy, but I think that for the most part people deserve a courteous response. If after receiving a courteous response, someone is still acting belligerently then they should just be quietly banned from the forum.

I realize that there are people who come here looking for trouble, but I think that there are ways to deal with that, that don't involve the editors bringing themselves down to the troublemaker's level. I know it's sometimes hard, and on occasion I've posted a comment that I've later regretted, but I think we all have to try our best to be civil to each other, or we'll end up like an SEO forum

Well said Donald.