suggestion on status check

just a suggestion .......... dmoz can have automated site status chk...... but with a fees involved, may be $ 10 per chk..... and selective on response like

"pending" or "no such site pending" and even "site fears declared spam"

i know money is nowhere involved in dmoz ...... but that money can be used for some gr8 cause ...... may be disaster relief ...... or new technology

this will end cuirosity of many and keep the editors free from overburden of responding to such questions as was case earlier

This has been suggested many times. And the answer was and still is: it won't happen. Reason: it will add no value for dmoz, the editors or our customers.

pvgool said:

it will add no value for dmoz, the editors or our customers.

Click to expand...

customers, who is your customers, web masters ?? or search engines/directories.

this will definitely help the webmasters and in turn dmoz can make millions that can be used for research in technology. dmoz can sponsor research works related to directory, can give scholorships .... even organise seminars for both editors or web masters.

this was just my opinion looking at so many curious posts on status checks.

Our customers are the people that use the directory. Either people using it to surf (which are relatively few) or some of the many users of the free data that the ODP provides.

Webmasters are definitely not the customers of the ODP. There are many other directories whose customers are webmasters.

And direct financial gain is not something the ODP looks for, or has ever looked for. Many editors feel that as soon as money becomes any sort of overt driving force, the directory will suffer.

Hope this clarifies.

If you wish to donate money to fund scholarships, there are numerous organizations that will be willing to act as intermediary: the ODP will even help in its own inimitable way: check out http://dmoz.org/Reference/Education/Colleges_and_Universities/Financial_Aid/Scholarships/ for starters, although there are several other relevant categories.

I've donated money and time directly to schools (the ODP not being involved, naturally); and I suspect that your sense of accomplishment will be greater (and you can better fulfil your responsibility for ensuring your time and money is poductive of good) if you work directly through a school with which you are familiar, and whose reputation you respect.

These people running this DMOZ operation are from the stone age.

JMHO

Now that editors aren't spending vast amounts of time telling people that their submission was received, they now have much more time available for doing other things.

We never did want to tell spammers that we had detected their spam, but we did want to help genuine people with genuine sites if they had problems. It was rapidly found that most of the enquiries were for sites we considered spam, and most of the requests were from people trying to game the system. So, after a couple of years, the facility was terminated.

Editors don't miss it. At all. And genuine webmasters who know that their site really is listable can relax and realise that if it is listable, then surely, eventually, it will be listed, and the submission to the directory made the site just that little bit easier to find when the time comes that someone decides to work in the category that it was suggested to.

If your site isn't listable, then we don't want your suggestion, and we don't want to tell you what we did with it, or when... nor do we want to set up some automated interface to let that information out of the door either.

rcarr, the kind of "management" you're looking for is (still) absent by design. That is a kind of structure common to peer-reviewed volunteer organizations: it might surprise you to learn that modern academia and science and modern science were for several generations the only kind of publicly visible systems so organized. (The structure spontaneously arises in religious contexts, but outsiders don't usually notice.) But wherever work toward an idealistic goal can be widely distributed (as here), it is the most efficient and most effective mode possible. What makes it efficient is the lack of wasted energy in attempts to control it (and, of course, in avoiding the disastrous consequences of ill-thought-out attempts to control it.)

If you prefer to think of it as an idealized stone age tribe, with tribesmen sharing information about the best places to find game, and the places to avoid because of spamming predators -- in the times before the first Marxist dictator, or Fuhrer, or even capitalist pig threatening to cut off access to the tribal lands for any tribesman who doesn't turn over the best three quarters of his latest hunting bag -- you perhaps won't be too far wrong.

Come to think of, it, most of our contacts with spammers tend to look like that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the feudal king and his loyal armed thugs meet the anarcho-syndicalist commune. "Strange people lurking in fora flinging dicta is no basis for a system of information exchange. Supreme executive power is a self-delusive concept; real leadership derives from exemplary performance toward the communal goal. not from some farcical aquatic platitude....Come and see the idiocy inherent in the system...."

>> These people running this DMOZ operation are from the stone age. <<

Indeed, we're all hunter/gatherer types.

$10 bucks per request?...sheesh..I'd rather spend 10 seconds looking in my category and if it isn't there...wait another week and check again. Meanwhile...take the kids to Amy's for ice cream with the $10. Other than that, if you THINK your site may be spam and still hoping to sneak it by an editor...good luck!...lol

We stopped doing status checks because the information was totally useless except to a spammer wanting to know if we had spotted and removed their spam so they could have another go. Quite often they would ask lots of questions about the rejection to get some clues as to how to better disguise themselves next time. For legitimate enquirers the answers were always you are not listed but then you can see that for yourself. The nature of editing means that predicting when a site would be reviewed is impossible. I am sure a spammer would willingly pay $10 for that valuable information. You'll understand why that isn't a good deal for us or anyone we really care about as editors. The rest would be getting nothing for their money. If refusing to take money off people in exchange for meaningless information is stone age then I'm proud of that. But then that is a concept alien to spammers - parting the gullible from their hard-earned cash is the name of the game isn't it.

How about this instead. If you make a little extra money from a DMOZ listing or save some by following all the guidelines and submit your site yourself rather than paying someone to do it for you then after you have fed the kids and paid the mortgage, donate a little of the surplus to your favourite cause. If you want.

You keep saying that status checks are useless; yet, via status check, I found out that acarplace.com had been kicked out for some weird transient reason that had not been valid for a year or two. That led me to re-submit the site, which, in between another day and another decade, may well lead it to be listed. Being a webmaster I realize that dmoz does not exist for me. On the other hand I *could* argue that maybe some people might find the unique content on the site to be useful, and then I'd see the argument that if it was useful, it would already be listed.

I could argue that I'm not a spammer but anyone making that argument is assumed to be a spammer.

"Most" of the enqiuries were indeed from spammers, but not by any means all of them. The baby seems to get thrown out with the bathwater.

davez, nobody has denied that there are such cases. What I do categorically deny is that there are enough of them to make status checks worth doing. For every case like yours, there are a hundred probing spammers.

So the rational approach to the real (but rare) issue you exemplify is to ask: "what's the most efficient method of finding sites that fall through the cracks the first time?"

And put that way, the answer is obvious. Forget the status checks, and proceed to encourage editors to look for sites in more different ways -- so that if Google fails to display a site AND its site suggestion gets lost, THEN we'll still pick it up spidering links pages or checking links from magazine pages.

Conceptually, make the whole process more comprehensive, rather than trying to force everyone to use the most inefficient and least comprehensive and most biassed and most dangerous methodology.

Your result was very much the "minority". There were a few problems like yours that the forums did resolve. However it is also true that if a site really is good, that an editor may well come across it and add it independantly of any submission that was made. Often editors are adding sites that have never been submitted at all, so even if a submission is "lost", that doesn't bar the site from being added some other way.

Editors do have to ask whether rechecking 1000 sites that we thought we didn't want to list, in case we accidentally deleted 2 or 3 that we meant to keep, is time better spent than reviewing 1000 sites (whether submitted sites, or sites found "elsewhere isn't stated) that we have never reviewed before and seeing what of those could be useful. In every case, you'll have to agree that the latter option wins by a very large margin every time.

In a raging torrent of used suds being channeled down the spam drain, there will always be a couple of unintended casualties: humans are prone to make occasional mistakes, but such a mistake can be rectified by any editor at any time once it has been noticed. The problem with this forum was that there was a whole chorus of people claiming such mistakes, and only 3 or 4 per thousand were actually genuine in their claim.

Well, that's a much nicer response than I've seen before, and it does make sense, though acarplace.com remains unlisted...in this case due to a mistake by a machine or editor apparently causing a de-listing (that I learned in the status forum). I would assume at this point due to the time lag that it has once again joined those 2-3 per thousand mistakenly consigned to the bottom, and will await the chance of an editor running across it independently. Though this does raise the question of "why have a submission process?" if it brings up 99.9% spam.

I do recall from my editor days that the ratio was rather different, but that was then and perhaps the ratios have changed.

davez,

There are certain parts of the directory where the submission/spam ratio is that high - there are others where it is much much lower, and in some cases, is the best source of new listings.

There have been many debates about turning off submission altogether, but this is generally regarded as "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

drifting from issue forum not ready to debate

i think we are now drifting from main issue, status checks. It seems that forum is not willing to debate it any further and people inside thinks they had enough brainstorming to discuss it any further.

anyway thank you all for your responses to my query. whether you allow paid status checks or not, dmoz is going to remain biggest service to the net.

davez, don't read those statistics as saying the spam proportion is that high. It isn't, overall I believe it's below 90%, and if you look at the sites asking for status check, a half, more or less, were probably legitimate sites.

But that's not the thing. Look at the math like this:

50%, say, spammers
49.5%, say, legitimate sites that weren't helped by a submittal status.
00.5%, about -- legitimate sites that WERE helped.
-----
100%, total.

But how many other legitimate sites could have been found and reviewed with that same effort?

That makes sense.

I do think you shoudl replace the stock answer with the one you just provided - because telling people, particularly people who are legit and NOT spammers (like me!), that (a) just about everyone who requests a status check is a spammer and (b) DMOZ isn't there for webmasters but for web users is like waving a red flag in front of our faces. The two rebuttals are:

a) as you just said, a large number of status-checkers are legitimate
b) web users would probably benefit from having legitimate new sites added quickly (or at all).

Alucard is certainly right that some areas are relatively free of spam and in fact I recently had a submission for a specialized site get in within a single week. (It was a site that I took over from someone else and falls outside my usual area of writing; its content is very unique.)

One other brief note - I once sent a few suggestions to an automaker, back in the early 1990s. (As I vaguely recall, two were making it possible for us to set preferences via the driver info center, which Chrysler started doing with the 1999 Grand Cherokee, and shutting off the engine while coasting, which only Opel does as far as I know). The reply put me off buying from them again for a while: it was a post-card saying that if my suggestions were any good, they'd have thought of them already! I wrote back to them to say they weren't making any friends with that post-card, and got back a three-page single-spaced typed letter, saying that if my suggestions were any good, they'd have thought of them already! I wonder if any editors find that to be a familiar thought? (Submissions are almost invariably spam, and editors always find the best sites anyway!)

I'd hope that somewhere within Dmoz are editors having a lively discussion about creative ways to rid the submission lists of spam while at the same time increasing response times; and that the people in those discussions aren't throwing around the same inaccurate stats and making blanket statements about submittors and status-checkers and such all being spammers.

Finally, for what it's worth, I take my hat off to the vast number of non-hostile, non-offensive, serious and hardworking editors donating their time.

There is always work on finding more efficient ways of dealing with spam, although it's not something we talk about in public. We don't need to talk about the stats -- every editor who has done a few thousand site submittal reviews knows them in his bones. FTR, the stats given here weren't "inaccurate" so much as "not always understood" (which is the common fate of all statistics communicated in this culture.) Read them again more carefully, and I think you'll see that what we all said could be understood to refer to numbers very like what I quoted at the end.

It's very easy, in fact, for people to misunderstand statistics and convert them into mere prejudices -- "most submittals are spam" (which is true) into "all submittals are spam" (which is false) or even "most SUBMITTERS are spammers" (which is probably false, it's a near thing).

But, the thing is, whenever you start making proposals about what editors "must" or "should" do with ALL submittals sight unseen, you either shut your eyes tightly, or you inevitably come face to face with the fact: submittals AS A CLASS are not good things! (As a class, they aren't bad things, either: YOU MUST NOT TREAT THEM AS A HOMOGENOUS CLASS!

Statistics doesn't tell you how to treat them (good or bad!) -- it just tells you how much time you'd waste giving all of them treatment which would be useful for only a small fraction of them.

The submittals are there. They are there because editors sometimes find them useful. They are used when editors think they're useful -- and that's enough justification for having them. They aren't the only tool editors have -- and that's enough justification for ignoring them on any particular day, in favor of choosing to do something else.