What happens if a meta-editor becomes black hat?

Just curious, not debating anything here, but I am wondering what happens if a meta editor quits and becomes black hat.

Do you change all of your policies and procedures?

Or do the lucky few spammers get the benefit of their knowledge and can 'game' the ODP?

I understand and appreciate the need for companies like Google or Yahoo and how they keep the secret sauce secret, but it seems to me that is not so easy for ODP when they are comprised mainly of volunteers.

My point being that there could be a benefit in sharing your procedures. Encryption by obfuscation doesn't always work, long term.

My point being that there could be a benefit in sharing your procedures

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The only benefit would be for spammers and we won't tell them anything.

Other point are to me of no relevance and are already answered in your other thread.

The point being made by the others here is that you're offering critiques and suggestions based on having zero knowledge of what we already have in place. Some of that information you might gain if you were an editor, much of it you wouldn't know unless you were an editall or meta editor.

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Please stop asking for things we won't answer because it is about information only available for editors.

Is rudeness a pre-requisite for being an editor? Perhaps that's why a lot of smart people don't apply?

I wasn't asking for anything. I was merely pointing out that keeping secrets that can (and most likely) will be easily exposed at some point by a frustrated or profiteering meta-editor is not a long term effective process.

I wasn't debating, I didn't personalize the conversation, I wasn't being bitter, I didn't have an axe to grind, I wasn't trying to get revenge, I wasn't trying to manipulate - I was merely pointing out a fairly salient and interesting point.

Can you folks not give people any benefit of the doubt whatsoever?

Speaking for myself, I'm highly cynical and give no site owner the benefit of the doubt, and you sound like an SEO probing for inside info. But maybe that's just me.

Our policies and procedures are all pretty much open already. You can read the editors' guidelines and even meta-editors' guidelines today.

And the tools are always improving anyway, as editors figure out what would help them do their job better, and as staff (or other editors) have time to implement them.

But the fundamental process is human site reviews. And that doesn't change.

If we tell you any more, we'd have to kill you.

Well that's what happened to the last Meta that went black hat.

bobrat, you do not know that. You were not there. But if the story gets out, we have your shoes with the victim's blood on them. And have you seen your tire iron lately?

OK, I admit it, I was just making an intelligent guess.

I'm not an SEO. I run a company which sells software. I use PPC pretty much for 99% of my marketing. SEO is a gamblers task.

I have an interest of using the ODP to provide the logical structure of a virtual reality universe some friends and I are considering building.

It's kind of a gibson's cyberspace / snowcrash concept where neighbourhoods and localities will be based on ODP categories.

Unfortunately, ODP is a very poor subset of the entire web universe. A lot of very good websites are not being included, and some that are, are in the wrong categories.

Anyways, my hopes would be to contribute some suggestions I feel which would greatly enhance the operational efficiencies so when we are ready to use it, it might be in better shape.

Unfortunately, my ideas seem to be encountering nothing but holier than thou rudeness and "you don't know what you're talking about and we're going to keep the secrets only among the 62 thousand editors that you're not apart of"

Trust me, I *do* know what I am talking about. I have been using ODP since inception, I have been on the internet since before it was even the internet, and I have a very significant background in the organisation of information.

However, none of this has anything to do with the validity of my ideas and concepts. I have argued from a reasoned, logical point of view which deserves to be responded to in a reasoned, logical way. Attributing me with various motivations or perverting my statements to mean something else for the basic desire of an easy 'boy you're an idiot' is going to get none of us anywhere and really only gives your organisation a very very bad name.

If you want to help out, become an editor.

The reality is, that until you have been an active editor for a while, you don't know what happens.

I've had sites listed in ODP for years, and I've been on the internet since before it existed, I worked on project ARPA, using Multics at MIT in 1966, and that didn't help me to know what went on in internal to ODP. After a year being an editor, I'm still learning.

Looking at the ODP from the outside, is like watching a bee flying, and trying to extrapolate what goes on the hive.

A lot of very good websites are not being included, and some that are, are in the wrong categories.

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Is very easy for you to change this.

1) suggest the sites that you think are missing
2) send update request for sites that are in wrong categories

But keep in mind what are 'good websites' for you may not be acceptable listings for us. And what seems the 'wrong category' for you may be the right one for us.

I have to become an editor to know that you have a massive backlog and a problem with spam?

I have to be an editor to know that Spammer Sue can submit 1000 websites without ODP editors knowing who they are coming from?

I just read the threads. Editors are constantly complaining about Spam and about weeding through all the crap to find the good stuff.

I recommend using a trust network with heuristics to prioritize submittals and all I get is "You don't know what you're talking about you're not an editor".

Is this a reasoned, well thought out response?

Hello? Admin who closed your other thread here...remember me?

Please don't turn this thread into a rehash of the one I closed. This was and still is an argument about how the ODP is run. Please don't do that here.

T'anks muchly.

Well thanks for not shooting first / asking questions later this time.

But the gun's still loaded and pointed at this thread.

Well, I've certainly put a lot of thought into my posts. (I can't speak for bobrat, of course.)

And part of what I thought about was: Can this information i propose to give be abused? Is there any indication that it can be used effectively to develop some constructive suggestion?

And, no matter how I turned it, for almost everything I wanted to say, the answer kept coming back, "yes" and "no".

Now, I may have more experience inferring implementation details from behavior; and so I'm perhaps unusually cautious about giving behaviorial information that would allow implementation details to be deduced. (I realize that most people probably wouldn't infer what I realize I'd be implying, but we're not pandering to just the clever spammers either.)

Now, IIRC, the one concrete proposal you made that wasn't shot down for being "degenerate hooliganism totally incompatible with our progressive socialist state" was the idea of "semi-trusted submitters."

And as I see it, there are two problems with that. (1) We have no reason to believe that there are honest submitters who really will submit enough sites to build a reputation (we know there are dishonest ones, but, as you say, THEY try to AVOID building a reputation); and (2) We have no way of forcing editors to act on that reputation, assuming it were developed.

The vast majority of honest submitters (in our experience) either don't submit very many sites at all, or they become editors. And if someone were to learn the ODP guidelines well enough to place and describe sites correctly -- it would be absolutely trivial for them to volunteer to edit a small category and do a few edits a month, just to keep their hand in.

So, when this idea (or a close kin of it) was discussed internally, the final consensus was that we couldn't identify a pressing need for a "semi-trusted" category of people.

I think I implied all this before, but I may have been relying too much on all the implications that seemed obvious to me.

There is one other point where the Directory priorities differ from those of any conceivable submitter. If there are already, say, 3000 gift shops listed, then it is really a very low priority to get any more listed. After all, our customers will surely be satisfied with the selection we give! Likewise, dietary supplements, patent health nostrums, web designers, and many other categories with typically large backlogs. But each submitter cares about only one site on earth -- for them, that site is priority 1, 2, and 3, and there is no priority 4. This is a fundamental conflict of interest, and it won't change. They need to act on their own best interests, but they need to understand that we probably will not act in their interest: even if we do, it will be only as an accidental side effect. They may consider that a problem, but we do not -- and will not -- consider it a problem.

Sorry motsa - I have to:

Some people might try to submit in small, underdeveloped categories just so that they can build up a reputation and prove themselves so they can get their main website in.

Please note that a good reputation does not and should never guarantee inclusion, just a prioritized review.

I think your "prioritized submissions" idea is well-intentioned and even interesting, but it doesn't serve our needs. Most good submissions, as well as most bad submissions, come from email addresses we've never seen before (usually the owner of the new site being submitted). Deprioritizing these would be pointless. Why would we want to give special priority to the handful of SEO-types who had successfully submitted multiple sites in the past? Their suggestions aren't special enough to deserve prioritized treatment or numerous enough that this would be a particularly efficient use of our time.

The logical extension of what you're suggesting is, of course, to deprioritize site submissions entirely (given that they're more likely to be garbage than sites an editor finds himself). This has also been suggested in the past. And I have to admit I find it tempting, but our volunteer model dictates that each editor may and should add sites in whatever way he or she prefers, and some prefer to search the submissions queue, so removing it (or forcing long-term SEO submitters to be sorted to the top of everyone's queues, for that matter) would go against our volunteer principles.

As far as the question in the original post, the only 'secrets' being kept are the tools and techniques we use to catch out spammers. The fewer spammers who know this, the better. Fact of the matter is, the majority of spammers are stupid. They leave obvious clues that make them easy to catch automatically, semi-automatically, or manually by rote. By not sharing spam-busting techniques publicly, we retain the edge over the majority of spammers, and this is good. No matter what we do there will always be *some* spammers who are going to sneak one by us, but the harder we make this, the fewer of those there will be. And, frankly speaking, the value of an ODP link is limited, so many of the same unethical peddlers who would be intelligent enough to bypass our spam detection methods are also intelligent enough to realize it's not worth wasting so many hours of their expensive time on and work on more cost-effective sleaze like manipulating Google results directly. I can't even imagine the brain dysfunction it would take for someone to spend the THOUSANDS of hours it takes to become a meta merely to learn what spam tools the ODP is using so they could take that knowledge and become a black hat SEO with it.

The main problem we have with spam is the volume of it. It only makes sense that we're more interested in actions that will help deal with the MAJORITY OF SPAMMERS than in actions that will help deal with a FEW EXCEPTIONALLY OBSESSIVE AND UNUSUAL SPAMMERS, right? If there have been five SEO's who have ever worked their way to meta in order to learn better spamming techniques, I'd be surprised. But there must be more than 50,000 run-of-the-mill spammers out there. So it's only logical that we'd prefer it if only the five guys knew what we were doing than the other 50,000. It's just common sense.

I have argued from a reasoned, logical point of view which deserves to be responded to in a reasoned, logical way.

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Actually, I don't think you have done that. Nor do I think you have done your homework.

Have you actually read the editing guidelines front-to-back several times, and are thus conversant on how we edit and what we do/don't do?

Have you actually read our social contract, or are you simply satisfied to repeat the words with scare quotes around them?

Because, frankly, if you ahve not done those two things, you are simply wasting bandwidth. These two threads feel vey much like when the computer consultants walk in the front door and announce "You've got a problem, and as soon as we find it, we'll give you our solution."

Just reading forum postings gives you a very incomplete picture at best. This is the place where we hear from the small vocal minority. This is where the spammers and scammers come to test us out.

I also sense that you are relly not listening to us as clearly as you insist we listen to you.

You say: ODP has a big backlog and that is a problem.
We say: ODP has a big backlog, but we don't see it as a problem.

You say: We need to grade/evaluate editors to make them better.
We say: We already have systems in place, that you cannot see, to grow/develop editors.

You say: Share your innermost secrets with me.
We say: Read the guidelines and social contract.

You say: Develop a system of trusted submitters.
We say: Been there, done that.