Wats the Waiting Period, waiting here for almost a year.

Hello,
Its almost like 1 year now waiting for my 3 sites to be listed here on dmoz, even read How to get your site listed FOUR times faster! and had followed like its said in there but still i cannot find my sites nowhere on dmoz.

So can admin/editor tell me on an average how long is the wait time?

No, we can't. And the reason is very simple. We (the editors) don't know the answer.
I would advise you tot read our FAQ.

pvgool said:

I would advise you tot read our FAQ.

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K i suppose i wait a year or more.

There isn't anything in reality that corresponds to "wait time."

Some sites are listed very shortly after they go online (which would be six years and counting before they were first suggested!)

Other sites are never listed. No matter when you start counting, the average time is infinity.

Other sites haven't been listed yet, so even if we knew when you started counting (which we don't), we wouldn't know how long to wait.

Other sites have been published, suggested, AND listed (in that order, even!) But we almost never look at the publication date, and we don't keep track of first suggestion date. And if we DID both of those things, we wouldn't assume that the sites in that category are typical of sites in the other categories -- in fact, editors work very hard to make sure that they aren't. So the statistics not gathered here wouldn't be applicable to the other sites (for which statistics can't be gathered).

In other words, the question is meaningless.

If not meaningless, it would have no practical effect for a single site, since (as always with statistics) there's no way of knowing where in the distribution the site might fall under.

My advice is always this: assume your site will never be listed by the ODP, for whatever reason (all the editors personally hate you, or the ODP will die first, or the site isn't listable all, or just sheer bad luck in the lottery.) After all, it doesn't matter to YOU what reason there is for the site not being listed -- what matters to you is that you'll have to find other ways to promote your site. So do what you have to do.

If your assumption was wrong, and the site is listed 13 months 3 days 2 hours from now -- you'll have done the right thing. And if your assumption is right and the site is never listed -- you'll have done the right thing, because your site will be better promoted than other sites only listed in the ODP.

Those odds of doing the right thing are hard to beat.

owner said:

K i suppose i wait a year or more.

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You are not likely to ever 'hear' anything from dmoz, well if its listed it will eventually show on the public side of the directory, so why wait? There really is nothing to wait for. Suggest the site and carry on business as usual, your customers/visitors will appreciate it.

Hope that helps.

hutcheson said:

My advice is always this: assume your site will never be listed by the ODP.

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Cool will try to forward that to others too, thats its not worth submitting sites cause it might never get accepted.

It is always worth suggesting a site, because it might help an editor to find it when he is building a category. But the publicly available guidelines have always stated that no site is guaranteed a listing, so the fact that the site "might never get accepted" should not be news.
As we keep reminding people, we are not a listing service, and site suggestions are simply one way for editors to find sites.

meaningless?

this is not a flame, you are attempting to organize a human based directory and i applaud that. but let me get this straight- you are obviously tired of hearing people ask about their sites. whether they are spammers or kids with tips on how to beat a video game, you're over it. on top of that, you want no responsibility for the approval of or ignoring of whatever site does or does not exist. but for some reason, i think as you read this, you have a grin on your face. i am suspicious of who really is running this operation.

here is where i am coming from. i've submitted over 10 sites to this directory. sites i merely like, sites i've built, my own personal art portfolio website. from business to pleasure to passion. only one of these sites has been accepted, some have been over 3 years since submission. the sites i`ve built have all been art/film/portfolio based sites. good ****. great art.

what i'm getting at, however poorly, is that you don't really seem to care about quality as much as you do anonymity. you spend more time masking who runs this show and who is in charge than you do actually creating a healthy database. if it's only up to one person (or a group of similar people) to edit a category, that person can have a very flawed opinion about what is and what isn't accepted. after filling out one request to be an editor, it is easy to figure out how to become one the next time around. so your attempts at purity seem to have failed on a fundamental level.

and what is the purpose of this forum? those who come here seeking assistance are shut out and leave only knowing they don't have a chance in hell to ever know, until they know, which they never will. it seems like a great place for a very few to bask in their dmoz gloryhole. ok that was a bit of a flame but you are not very courteous in your ways either.

it seems like your community here needs a bit of a checkup from the neckup and old ned flanders would put it. i am not bitter, i have great google returns for all my sites, but i think now, after reading this forum, that i don't buy it.

Grin? Hardly. Concerned frown, rather.

you don't really seem to care about quality as much as you do anonymity. you spend more time masking who runs this show and who is in charge than you do actually creating a healthy database.

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Nobody is trying to hide who "runs this show". The ODP is owned by Netscape, which is part of AOL/TW. They own the hardware, they pay the tech staff. The rest of us are strictly volunteer, donating a few hours of our time here and there.

What I think you are actually wondering about, though, is the identity of the editors who are responsible for the various categories. This isn't an easy matter, though. First, no one person is responsible for any one category. Even if there is a named editor in a category (which you can see at the bottom of the category page) there are always more people who can edit in the category -- and there is never any guarantee that any of them will. You do have a point about one person with a skewed viewpoint being able to skew a category. From time to time (not that often, I should add) senior editors have to clean up huge messes in categories edited by editors who had been pushing their own agenda, or who simply didn't understand how editing works. But there are systems in place to minimize this, and it is not such a huge problem. The only way to remove the possibility would be not to accept any new editors, and I'm sure you agree that that would be a worse solution.

Editors' anonymity is preserved for good reason. This is a hobby, and not many people think it's worth getting harrassing email and phone calls over something you spend a few hours on now and then for fun. (Email and phone calls are very far from the worst harrassments that happen to editors, either.)

As for people "coming here to ask for assistance"; the thing is, many of them come here to ask for information we don't have. There is no humanly possible way for any of us to tell when a specific category, much less a specific site, will be edited. And so, yes, those people must necessarily be disappointed, unless they make an effort to understand what the ODP actually is -- and that is often also a disappointment for somebody whose only proprity is to get exposure for their own site. You see those threads all over the place, and of course the whole forum takes on a flavour from them. That's unfortunate, but short of removing threads in a much more draconian fashion there is nothing to do about that other than trying to get to the stuff that actually has some relevance.

this is not a flame, you are attempting to organize a human based directory and i applaud that. but let me get this straight- you are obviously tired of hearing people ask about their sites. whether they are spammers or kids with tips on how to beat a video game, you're over it. on top of that, you want no responsibility for the approval of or ignoring of whatever site does or does not exist. but for some reason, i think as you read this, you have a grin on your face. i am suspicious of who really is running this operation.

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Good morning, magicgravy, .

I'm not tired of hearing it, it's a perfectly logical inquiry, but we don't do that here anymore. Please read this:
http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=39116

We're all volunteer editors, who also volunteer to come over here and interact with the public. I do get a smile on my face at some of the questions/statements, but, it's not one of disrespect or glee of someones concern.

here is where i am coming from. i've submitted over 10 sites to this directory. sites i merely like, sites i've built, my own personal art portfolio website. from business to pleasure to passion. only one of these sites has been accepted, some have been over 3 years since submission. the sites i`ve built have all been art/film/portfolio based sites. good ****. great art.

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Thank you for your site suggestions, but no site has a right to be listed, and there is no guarantee that it will be listed, as we state over and over again. Site suggestions are very welcome and appreciated, but, we have other ways of finding new sites, many other editing tasks to do, and no editor is required to do anything other than what they'd like to do or have time to do.

what i'm getting at, however poorly, is that you don't really seem to care about quality as much as you do anonymity. you spend more time masking who runs this show and who is in charge than you do actually creating a healthy database. if it's only up to one person (or a group of similar people) to edit a category, that person can have a very flawed opinion about what is and what isn't accepted. after filling out one request to be an editor, it is easy to figure out how to become one the next time around. so your attempts at purity seem to have failed on a fundamental level.

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You're doing just fine in putting down your thoughts, . Actually, this is not where we do our editing, we do that in the ODP Directory, this forum is for interacting with the public about the ODP.

All editors follow the same Guidelines in their editing. These very same Guidelines are open for the publics view:
http://dmoz.org/guidelines/

and what is the purpose of this forum? those who come here seeking assistance are shut out and leave only knowing they don't have a chance in hell to ever know, until they know, which they never will. it seems like a great place for a very few to bask in their dmoz gloryhole. ok that was a bit of a flame but you are not very courteous in your ways either.

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It is true that we no longer give site specific help and that the only way to know if your site has been listed is when it shows up in the Directory on the public side, I understand your frustration, and I'm sorry, but, that's the way it is.

Just a tiny flame, magicgravy, and not one that bothers me, , sometimes you just need to vent a little.

it seems like your community here needs a bit of a checkup from the neckup and old ned flanders would put it. i am not bitter, i have great google returns for all my sites, but i think now, after reading this forum, that i don't buy it.

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I'm not sure what it is you don't buy, other than not getting the site specific help that you'd like, or not knowing exactly what kind of help to ask for in here, that we can give you.

I can only speak for myself, but, I don't need to be here at all, I have many other things I could be doing, but, I do enjoy talking to people like you, and trying to share what inside knowledge of the Directory, and the process that I can to try to help you out.

I'm just an ordinary person, and I have no need or desire to bask in the sunlight, or feel all powerful, I'm just trying to help you, .

if it's only up to one person (or a group of similar people) to edit a category, that person can have a very flawed opinion about what is and what isn't accepted.

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I need to address this a little more. Besides the general Guidelines that we all follow, each category description (located in the right, upper corner of the category page) describes what type of sites are accepted to be listed in that category.

That could be helpful to you, magicgravy.

As far as an editor having a "flawed opinion" about what should be accepted or declined in a specific category, you could be very right.

We have a large shortage of volunteer editors and many categories don't have a specific editor in them, and the editors who ARE in the area might be overloaded with site suggestions and other tasks that need to be done.

A person, such as yourself, with the passion for and knowledge of a certain topic, and who could devote his/her time to honestly making it a quality category, would be very valuable to have.

I'd like to see you apply to be an editor, .

But, acceptance isn't guaranteed and I have nothing to do with the review process, much more experienced meta editors do that. I'm only trying to encourage you.

Site suggestion

I've got a site to suggest but not for the ODP, for Hucheson.

www dot plainenglish dot co dot uk

Hamboid said:

I've got a site to suggest but not for the ODP, for Hucheson. www dot plainenglish dot co dot uk

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Yeah but hutch is from Saturn so he only speaks the "Dionese" dialect.

Thanks a lot, Hamboid, I had a mouth full of coffee when I read that, .

you want no responsibility for the approval of or ignoring of whatever site does or does not exist.

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It doesn't matter whether I want it or not. I don't HAVE, and I CAN'T have, that responsibility.

nea, markhod, and all the other editors do whatever they do, without getting my permission first, and without asking for my approval afterwards. And, so long as whatever they do is good work, who would be so selfishly arrogant as to complain? Not me, certainly!

So how could I be responsible for their work if I wanted to?

The ODP doesn't have any way to complain about good work. And it doesn't need one. It has ways to complain about poor work, and ways to suggest more work (for whoever is interested.)

Oh, I'll fix anybody's errors, if I notice them. (And they fix mine.) But they do far more work than I can double-check. So I'm not responsible for any of it.

I'm responsible for my work: to make sure that what I do within the ODP improves it; not to sabotage it even by work elsewhere ... but I can't be responsible for what I don't do.

If we start assessing responsibility that way, hamboid would be far more responsible for any shortcomings the ODP has, because there's far more work HE hasn't done than I ever dreamed of not doing. But no sane, rational person would attempt to assess responsibility that way .... right?

crowbar said:

Thanks a lot, Hamboid, I had a mouth full of coffee when I read that, .

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here are some tissues to clean your computerscreen
and a new :cup: with a little extra :cake:

Thank you, pvgool, it's great to have friends, .

Sorry about that

Yes, sorry Crowbar. I should've made sure everyone was safely positioned before a quote like that. Use this to protect your screen next time :umbrella: