Spiteful Competitor Posing as Editor and Rejecting Our Site

Several years ago, I noticed our website was removed from the Dmoz directory. When I went to submit it, it was swiftly rejected. I then applied to be an editor and that too was immediately rejected.

Our company is one of the largest leaders in our field of business. Our website is close to 3000 pages of information rather than sales pitches. The site lacks any violations that Dmoz.org cites for rejection. As a matter of fact, since inception, our company's website was the only website in our field that provided as much specific information to the prospecitive customer for what was being sold as ours. There is no reason why the site should have ever been deleted and then prevented from being listed. The OBVIOUS reason is that a spiteful competitor has weaseled their way into becoming an editor in the category in which we belong.

Once per year, in the last three years, I have submitted abuse reports citing this. Not once have I ever received a response regarding this. Despite dmoz.org being a human run effort, I have wondered if there was anyone left breathing on the receiving end of my futile attempts.

Would someone please look into this and either post a way this can be followed-up or email me directly? I am not only certain that a competitor is preventing our listing but I also have a pretty darn accurate idea of who is behind it although he is sly enough to use an alias or straw-user to accomplish this.

Halisaurus,

I can appreciate your frustration, but from our point of view there are other possibilities. Please PM me the URL of your site and I will look into it.

Thanks.

Would someone please look into this

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Look into what? You've provided none of the detail that would make it possible.

Abuse reports are investigated. Every time you raised one you were issued with an abuse report number. You can check the status of any abuse report by entering its number at http://report-abuse.dmoz.org/ . I suggest that you do that.

And....

Spiteful Competitor Posing as Editor and Rejecting Our Site

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is a spiteful canard that, if issued without proof, is highly offensive to the tens of thousands of editors who have participated in the the project in an honorable manner.

Halisaurus has given me a URL. I have looked into it. This URL has never ever been listed in the ODP. No editor has even removed it from a unreviewed area, or moved it to another area. I have no idea where you are getting your information from that it was at any time listed in the ODP.

So unless you want to count me as one of the corrupt competitor, your accusations are decidedly mis-placed, I'm afraid. Given this complete lack of evidence, I am certain that abuse reports would have been ignored.

Well then.......

I could have sworn it was listed in 2001 but if I am wrong then sorry, I stand corrected.

What I am NOT wrong in is the last three years of submissions to the category: Shopping: Recreation: Science and Nature: Earth Science: Fossils
and in every submission, it has been rejected. Alucard has the url and if he visited the site, I would like a single explanation why my site would not be accepted when 87 others are there with many of them offering less than ours in several aspects. The very first site there is no longer a site and one of the others no longer sells fossils which is the nature of the category to begin with.

What other explanation could there be??? If anyone wants to know the url, get it from Alucard or pm me.

>What I am NOT wrong in is the last three years of submissions to the category: Shopping: Recreation: Science and Nature: Earth Science: Fossils
and in every submission, it has been rejected.

But ... if it had been rejected, that would appear in the logs. And alucard would have seen it.

Or -- if it had been rejected and somehow NOT shown up in the logs, alucard would then be misled, but so would everyone else -- there would be no way ANYONE could KNOW it was rejected (other than, I suppose, the editor who did it. But ... are you claiming the editor who did it told you about it?)

What you are saying makes no sense. There is no way to fit it inside reality in this universe.

Something else is going on here. Is it possible that you have multiple domain names, and you had submitted one of the others, rather than the one you told alucard? I'm gaping at straws here, obviously, but ... alucard has no reason to lie, and I'm reluctant to assume you're just crazy.

The other possibility is: you heard something from someone, and (not understanding how the ODP works) you misunderstood it and rephrased in words that you thought meant the same thing. Can you tell us, without any interpretation, without any assumptions, as exactly and literally as possible, what information you have that led you to this seemingly inexplicable belief?

In this context, I'll mention that we've often been assured sites were "removed from the ODP" -- and then it turned out the sites weren't appearing in the Google SEARCH RESULTS, or the site was actually in the Yahoo directory, or something like that ... and what really happened was a memory lapse, possibly compounded by ignorance of internet technicalities. And so I'll ask -- are you sure you aren't thinking about either Google or Yahoo?

Thanks for writing. Alucard only responded to my statement that I believed it was already listed and removed. My main issue that goes unresolved is why for the past three years has it been rejected for acceptance? Alucard has not responded (not possible for him to definitively know???) if it has been repeatedly rejected based on log entries. I myself has made the repeated attempts to get it listed since 2002.

I discovered it not listed in the year 2002. I have submitted it once each year since then with a last submission just recently. What I am saying is that I believe this specific person (not just guessing it is a random competitor) has become an editor long ago and has been preventing the site from becoming listed in the category I cited in the last post.

I am specifically speaking about dmoz. I am well aware of the Yahoo directory and our rank in Google is very high regardless and has been so there are no issues there.

For pete's sake, we are a huge site and a leader in our field. The site is near 3000 pages, all valid unique content with no violations. To say I am frustrated and feeling hopeless on this matter is an understatement. This specific competitor has made it his life's most important quest to come out on top of us in google in all aspects and his site's inclusion in dmoz and ours not is the edge he would do anything for.

BTW, if what I am saying is so hurtful to some editors here or so outrageous, what precipitated a need for the existence of an ABUSE REPORT in the first place?

what precipitated a need for the existence of an ABUSE REPORT

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It's not there to handle accusations without evidence, esp. when it sounds like "my site isn't listed, so somebody must working to keep me out."

When editors do bad things, sometimes there's actually evidence. If there is evidence, someone pointing to that evidence may get an editor removed and wrongs righted.

No editor can keep your site out. The only way they could keep other editors would be to reject your submittal -- which, as alucard says, hasn't been done.

And so long as the submittal remains unrejected, any higher-level category editor or editall who's interested can edit there. In fact, I've even done a few edits there on occasion.

So the site apparently hasn't been reviewed yet. That is not "abuse." Because, if it WERE abuse, it would be a grand conspiracy involving every sentient creature in the solar system (because each and every one of us didn't review the site to the exact same extent!). But that's nonsense.

I won't get into the emotional reactions -- let's just say that a number of editors DIDN'T tell you how they REALLY felt, and let it go at that, OK?

OK, well that is news to me that you can see every submission. Multiple people in my company were present when we did the submissions in the past so I don't know how they were never logged.

This topic has been constantly resurfacing in our discussions for some time. If you can see every submission then I suppose you will see the one I just did this past week. Since I will not get any response when and if it gets rejected again, I don't know what else to do.

Multiple people in my company were present when we did the submissions in the past so I don't know how they were never logged.

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When a site is suggested to the ODP, it arrives to the category you suggest it to but there is no log entry that we can see. All editors who can edit in that category can see the link if they go to that particular category and check the unreviewed sites, but until a suggested site is reviewed and listed, moved to another category or rejected there will be no log for it.

Hence, the lack of editor logs for this site indicates that your site hasn't been rejected at any point. It simply hasn't been reviewed yet, which is not the same as a rejection. Please don't suggest it again; if you have suggested it several times over three years' time you have done everything you can to make sure an editor will review it at some point.

I have been instructed by the admins of this forum to give no further information on this URL, or its history, since we are getting into the realm of status checks on specific sites again.

Suffice it to say the initial spectacular allegations have proven to be speculation. To anyone else reading this thread, please - we understand your frustration - you want to see your site listed in every directory, including the ODP. When you don't see it listed for several years, you start coming up with ideas about why that could be. Ideas then start becoming factual, and lead to abuse allegations.

Abuse allegations are going to be taken seriously when there is some concrete evidence supplied with them. Not being listed in a timeframe you find acceptable is not sufficient evidence.

Does an editor have access to modify or delete logs or are they automated by all actions? (rejection, acceptance, review, etc.).

Hutcheson, you make mention of if an editor rejected the log. If the logs can be manipulated then are we not putting too much faith in the logs in my specific instance? (I am not saying editors are bad, logs are bad, the system is flawed). Just IS IT POSSIBLE?

No, an editor does not have access to manipulate the system logs.

Wrathchild is correct -- we cannot hack the logs. Three or four years ago there were a couple of times where system failures cost some logs to be lost, so I cannot absolutely say that could not happen. I can absolutely say, even if that had happened (which is extremely unlikely) then there would have been nothng indicating the site was rejected -- so what you were saying could still have had no evidentiary basis.

Thanks for your time to fully reply to this.