What happens if a meta-editor becomes black hat?

I hate missing the good conversations when I'm on business travel ....

Back to the original question of what happens if a meta-editor becomes black hat. Overall process-wise - nothing. The spam busting system we have isn't some mysterious method or "secret sauce" that if anyone knows they can game the system and sneak in. Here's what we do:

- We manage our data. We know what we know, we look for trends, we document and communicate.
- We know how the internet works. We understand IPs, domain name registration, hosting.
- We know what people are doing with the internet. We understand business schemes, SEO issues, spamming, etc.
- We know our topics. We know what does or doesn't belong in certain categories, and what the current spam techniques or affiliate programs are.
- We write tools and software to help us with common tasks and problems.

Although a given individual may not know much of the above information, collectively we know a lot. Sure, a sophisticated spammer might be able to submit a variety of sites to a variety of categories and get a few listed, but eventually we'll notice and clean the mess out. As flicker said, most spammers aren't very smart, and they are easy to spot. Anyone who spends enough time to understand what we know will also understand the (non-)importance of a link in the ODP in the grand scheme of things.

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

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No. You have to become an editor to understand our point of view. Once you understand our point of view, you'll understand why your suggestions (although well meaning and seemingly appropriate) just don't make sense to us. That isn't meant to be condescending, that is meant to be a sharing of experience. Before I joined, I thought editing was a fairly straight forward task-oriented job. After I joined, I discovered it was so much more than I thought - a huge community, a very organic process, so much to do and many different ways to do it! You can read back through some of the earliest threads on this forum and discover some folk who after becoming editors came back here to report "Oh, it is totally different than what I thought."

backlog

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It's been said before, but I'll say it again. In most areas of the directory I am more efficient at building out categories by finding sites on my own, rather than simply processing submissions. The submission pool is only one source of sites, and often not a very good one. We understand it is a concern to submitters, but it really isn't a concern to us.

bobrat: ..using Multics at MIT in 1966

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Hey another Multician. Except I was about 20 years later

Seriously though.. everything an editor does is logged and open to scrutiny by all other editors, from the thousands of category editors to the 300+ "senior" editors such as staff/metas/editalls/cateditalls etc.

tshephard - I think the problem is one of perception. The directory looks very different from the inside. The reason that editor sometimes seem rude when it comes to "perception" questions is that it's plainly obvious to us in ways that we can't easily explain.

However, I'm glad to see that you're looking at innovative ways of using the ODP data. It looks like you've realised that the ODP is much more than a listing of sites, it does give a structure to the web, even if it's incomplete. I've seen some exciting projects raised that use ODP data in completely novel ways. Just don't forget to put the ODP attribution in!

Hey another Multician.

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Small world. I did PR for the product in the late '70s.

Flicker, good points all-

Still:

I doubt anyone would (or could) become a meta-editor for the reason of specifically learning your spam tools.

However, spamming is not an obsession. Spamming is really marketing, and marketing is an extremely *profitable* role to play in modern day society, even if ethically it is often borderline because the hype doesn't match the content.

A lot of people around here think spammers are fools, but spammers, quite often are far more clever than you or I. Especially the ones that are very productive and will be around for quite awhile.

Spammers would become meta-editors as they recognize the value of learning from a community which is rapidly becoming (at least partially) central to the sum of all knowledge on the internet.

I say the ODP sucks - it does, but there is no better directory that I know of. Both Yahoo and Google refer to it as authoritative, and it is becoming more and more authoritative every day. Pretty soon MSN will come online and utilize the ODP as well. I hate to pump you guys up any more than you already are, but I think we can all safely bet that the best of ODP is still to come.

Anyways, a spammer doesn't necessarily have to become a meta-editor. Maybe a meta-editor would suddenly realise that they have very very valuable information to sell - how to game the ODP. They get pissed off because of the politics (all groups of people are political) or simply enter a self-destructive phase in their life and start uploading all of the spam tools to a P2P network. Whatever, it will happen, you can pretty much bet on it.

So my original point was that it is probably better to rely on processes which hold up under the light of day. A prioritization scheme which, when fully revealed, is still affective and difficult to game. Kind of like what Page Rank did for Google for awhile.

Which is why I made the recommendation of a utilizing a heuristical trust network. Unfortunately, I feel your argument made the mistake that all too often is made - looking it as a black/white issue. You felt that you would be forced to use such a system.

This is not necessarily the case - nothing ever is, when you use your imagination. Volunteer editors could easily be given an opportunity to sort by other characteristics when submitting. They could sort alphabetically, or use the ones with the most vowels.

Having different methods of determining priority is what keeps an organic culture that you talk about alive and keeps the process from bogging down and becoming to dogmatic - it also allows for an evolution to take place, which is always important.

However, I think over time Editors would start to see that the girl who submitted 5 carefully thought out submissions, all with spelling, grammar and everything else intact deserves a quick review over and above all the other websites that got submitted in less than 30 seconds for the first time.

After all, lets face it folks - some people become editors so that they can submit their own websites. We all know this. Why not make this fact known and public .. even encourage it.

Maybe instead of having 800,000 websites in the backlog, you'll have 800,000 new volunteers wanting to submit good websites so that they can get their one submission in that they really care about.

Hell, maybe by the time they go to submit their own website they'll have a much better understanding of what it takes to get into the ODP.

I think the discussion has run its course. Your proposals are sufficiently at odds with the concept, community, and experience of the ODP that you probably need to look for another audience.

The ODP has among its volunteers a wealth of good programmers, and an even deeper experential knowledge of spam in all its forms. We're going to have to proceed here on the basis that you have neither one. But if you disagree, go grab the RDF and try out your proposal. The discussion can be resumed when you actually have some evidence that you can create a proposal specific enough to implement, and functional enough to use finding abuse.

As for maintaining multiple prioritization methods: since each volunteer sets his own priority, we're not ikely to run short of different methods of priority, so that isn't an issue, And insofar as it might be less than ideal, our practice of accepting new editors is the proper solution. So you can stop worrying about that.

As for publicizing our spam-catching tricks, our programmers say you're all wet. And I say: any metric you can come up with, as soon as you publish it, even a spammer (well, maybe not any spammer, but any of them that made it through a whole year of computer science college coursework before flunking out) can write a program to generate automatic gibberish that slips right past it.

As for trying to attract more SEOs as editors: it is not one of our goals, and saying that a proposal would attract more SEOs is an argument against it. We do accept SEOs, even though they provide nearly all of our abusing editors. But what the ODP needs is more non-SEOs and fewer SEOs.

Why bother posting if you have nothing to contribute except insults and telling me what I do or do not know?

If you're looking for something useful to address, why not 'educate me' as to why encouraging people who wish to submit URLs in well developed categories should submit a few URLs in underveloped categories in order to develope a reputation and understand the submission process a bit more.

I will readily admit that even though I am extremely bright, successful, and very experienced I do not know everything and I am always interested in learning something from someone else.

You might profit from sharing my attitude.

I've seen hutcheson insult people. Believe me, that wasn't it.

He was simply pointing out that we don't think the things you've been suggesting are a particularly good fit for the ODP.

He also opined that this discussion has run its course. With that, I agree.