logging these notices and trying to contact the editor of that category and possibly tagging it as "not active"?
What you are proposing is well intended, I am sure, but reflects a lack of understanding of both how the editing process works, and the philosophy of the project.
Let's start with the second point first. It helps to think of the ODP editor community as a group of collectors. We collect URLs, put them in categories and share them with the surfers of the world. Our collection consists of sites we believe have unique content. We make no claim that we have listed every site, nor would we attempt to do so. We do think that we have a pretty good representative sampling in the approximately 600,000 categories where we list URLs. We also know that, given the dynamics of the web, we will never "finish" this project, and are comfortable with that thought.
As collectors, we welcome outside input (such as the site suggestion you made). We toss these suggested URL into pools, and fully intend to look at all of them, some day, when it interests us to do so. We've looked at the pools of suggestions, and they are often terribly bad. Not bad enough to make a wholesale run to the city dump, but pretty bad, nonetheless. Newer, less expereiced collectors, often "earn their stripes" working out of the suggestion pool, but a pattern we often see is that as editors gain more and more experience, they rely less and less upon suggestions.
Unfortunately, the people who make suggestions usually don't see it this way. They think we should basically stop what we are doing and focus our efforts on the pool of submissions. Some are even offended by the thought that they cannot purchase a place in our directory. They think of us as terribly anti-free-market. They feel that we have some sort of obligation to look at their suggestions within a given timeline (of their choosing). The editorial community, however, has never accepted that obligation -- and thus the gap in perceived reality.
So, the real (I hope this doesn't hurt your feelings) answer to why we haven't looked at your suggestion is: we don't feel like it. It is nothing personal. We might take a peek tomorrow, or next week, or sometime in 2009. But are really under no obligation to do so within any given timeframe.
Now I realize that this is a pretty alien concept, and I'm sure there are a million or so "productivity experts" or "managers" would would like to really straighten us out and get us "back on track" and "productive" but all of those things are alient to the editor community (expect, to the extent that we have to live in real life).
In (hopefully) answering the last part, I've given some clues to the first part. Think about 600,000 categories and fewer than 10,000 active editors. Then try and gues the percentage of editors who log in regularly. The infamous 80/20 rule probably applies, so in any given timeframe it is probably safe to assume that fewer than 2,000 editors do 80% of the edits. Now how long will it take a given editor to get to a given category. And, thinking back to how I begin this discussion, even if an editor hits a given category today, there is no guarantee that they will even look at the suggested sites. Woo Hoo. You can see how the numbers begin to look formidable.
This is why we say: submit it and forget it. Your suggestion is probably floating around in one of the suggestion pools, doing laps along with all the other suggestions we haven't looked at. It has plenty of company. But, rather than getting discouraged, think about this:
It is very, very possible that an editor/collector will stumble upon your site independently of your suggestion, will judge it on its merits, and decide whether or not to list it based on its content. It happens that way all the time.
Good luck
