I have just joined this forum to be able to participate in this thread.
I think DMOZ is great and it is indeed a free service run by volunteers, so there is little obligation with webmasters as you said.
And I understand completely that you've been totally spammed in the past and you have the right to be skeptical and even harsh with most webmasters.
Welcome, traveler.com.br, thank you for joining us. We've learned to be a little skeptical, but, I hope we try not to be harsh. I think we have a tendency to respond to how we are addressed.
But some of us are producing some really cool businesses and we would love to see our work up on DMOZ! I've submitted once a long time ago and now again, first because of the incredible value that comes with a listing at DMOZ, second because we are accredited by Brazil's main government and private tourism organizations, I think we really would add value to your Brazil travel agency listings....
Our job isn't to keep good sites out, just the opposite, but many assume that because an editor hasn't gotten around to reviewing one particular site suggestion out of the possible 10,000 suggestions that might be available, that there is something wrong with the site, the editor is crooked, or the submitter has made some terrible mistake in the submitting.
The truth is much simpler, it just hasn't been reviewed yet.
In the end, as you said, we're here to add value for the web user, not for webmasters. If you think about it, most editors are the webmaster-type, I think the relationship between editors and webmasters should be of a "same boat" attitude, not of rivalry and extreme skepticism.
That is a very reasonable idea that I happen to agree with. Professional webmasters could be of great service to the Directory, and speed the process up considerably, if they would just understand and submit a proper, ODP compliant Title and Description for each suggestion, to the correct category, submit it once only, make sure it the type of site that we do list, that it's not a redirect or a mirror, not still under construction, that the url actually works, and there is "unique content" on that particular site for that particular category, and that there are no dead links on the site,
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I do agree a partnership of sorts would be beneficial to both parties, but first, the webmaster community needs to understand and believe what we've been saying, that our main goal is to serve the web surfer looking for specific information, not the providers of the information, that no site has a right or a promise from us to be listed, that we will not accept all sites (because they may not have the unique content that we're looking for).
Another misconception is that we judge a companies worth compared to other companies, or that we judge the site design or size. That is false, we only judge the site itself, and whether it has the unique content on it that would add value to the category, for the benefit of the web surfer.
I, personally, no longer have any sites of my own. I took down all three of them as being unneccessary or too time consuming, and I had the pleasure of deleting them from the Directory myself. I don't delete many legitimate sites,
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One was a business site, one was an Ezine for professionals of my industry (in magazine format and quite extensive), and one was a forum that was never listed in the Directory, (it didn't qualify).
