Hi Declan,
First, one thing about Resource-Zone: We ask all submitters to wait 6 months between each repeat request for submission status. Since you got a status report (your site was waiting for review) on May 21, you are next eligible for a report on Nov 21. This has nothing to do with what's happening at dmoz.org - it is just a way of managing this forum.
I just wanted to send a gentle reminder that I am still patiently waiting in the hope that some kind editor will hear my pleadings and assure me that my site WILL be listed in the directory at some stage in the future.
We can't tell you that here - it is the decision of the reviewing editor. All we promise is a review of a suggested site; the inclusion or not in the directory is completely up to editorial discretion.
Is it DMOZ policy to tell people who have submitted websites that the process of review is entirely random? I mean surely there has to be some kind of order to the review process. Can anyone give me a definintive answer that is not 'random' or evasive?
The review process is not random, but there is no time frame at all for any given site, whether it is suggested from the outside or not. There are a couple of hundred people who are able to edit in a category; the people named as editors for that category and those above it, and editors with directory-wide editing privileges (Editalls and Meta editors.) It's never possible to know how many of these people will decide to edit on any given day, or where they will decide to edit. It is not possible to know if they will decide to open the pool of unreviewed sites and review some or all of them, or if they will review sites found in other ways, or if they will do other editorial tasks. It is not possible to know which order they will decide to review the suggested sites in; by date, by URL, or just picking the ones with a guidelines-compliant title and description first. For this reason, nobody can guess even roughly when any particular site will be reviewed. That aspect of it is indeed completely random, but it makes sense when you consider that we are not concerned with reviewing suggested sites - we are building a directory, and the sites the public suggests is one of many sources. From our perspective, what the ODP editing community is doing is not random.
The editorial guidelines are public, and are available at
http://dmoz.org/guidelines/ . You may also be interested in looking at our Social Contract at
http://dmoz.org/socialcontract.html .
