Suggest URL & Update URL fields

Additional suggested fields:

For both Suggest and Update:

Affiliation (owner, promoter (directly to SPAM filter), member, affiliate, ODP Editor in related field, etc....)

For Suggest URL:

Comment: (People are often being told to put comments in their submission, but there's no such field)

For Update URL:

Suggested directory location (if different from current location) for suggested moves.

Why are you posting this here? You should post this in the internal Bugs and Features forum if you want the tech people to see your suggestions.

One part is worth responding to here, because it resonates so strongly with the solipsistic myth cycle of the primitive affiliate webmaster tribe:

Why ask what affiliation the person has with the site? We don't care. Ever. Even though our primary solicitation is to interested surfers, we accept submittals from editors, competitors, webmasters, developers, and promoters. (In my experience, all of those groups include both helpful people, and pestilential ones.) If sites are good, we don't care who they're from. And if they are bad, we still don't care. We don't ever care. Really really. We really don't ever care.

Now, as I said, you can go over to webmasterworld or other forums, and read long diatribes about how the internet was specifically created (by Al Gore, presumably) for affiliate webmasters, and how it would collapse tomorrow if their every want were not instantly supplied by an insufficiently grateful universe. Right. Alexander Graham Bell was a simpleminded tool of the budding telemarketing industry, and human reproduction exists only to provide nutrition for tapeworms.

But that's all irrelevant. Whatever one may think of the internet at large, dmoz.org claims the right to set its own mission: we choose to judge websites by their content, not the phylum containing their submitters' ancestors. Asking for information which we wouldn't use anyway, is deceptively misleading.

IMHO, it would make it easier for an Editor if he could get trusted (or even plausible) information that the submitter is really interested in the good of the directory, rather than in specifically trying to get his site listed.

But I suppose even plausible information is unlikely....

However, that then becomes a suggestion for detailed wording of the forms, which I will submit in the internal forum. It still says "your site" in the descriptions -- (at least on the server which still says "Add URL").

>But I suppose even plausible information is unlikely....

Good point. So we never assume any connection, positive or negative, to the site. We get both kinds. We just review the site, either way.

This too puzzles some of the less devious submitters, who think we'll do whatever they say for their site because it, um, belongs to them. We generally don't want to go to the trouble to affirm that.

it would make it easier for an Editor if he could get trusted ..information that the submitter is really interested in the good of the directory, rather than in specifically trying to get his site listed.

Click to expand...

But why? I'm baffled. The motives of the submitter are immaterial. What matters is the site.

When I first submitted my site to the ODP I had no particular interest in the directory. I had only just discovered it. My site was listed presumably because the editor considered it to have useful and unique content. I then became interested in the ODP and volunteered to edit. But we don't expect that to happen every time.

>it would make it easier for an Editor if he could get trusted ..information that the submitter is really interested in the good of the directory, rather than in specifically trying to get his site listed.

Yes, and it would REALLY be helpful for the meta-editors if we had TRUSTED information that editor applicants were really interested in the good of the directory. There's nothing on earth we need more than that!

But we ain't ever gonna have it. So we muddle through with such incomplete and untrustworthy information as we have. That's life on the net. It's ... not all that different from life in the Neolithic era.