Why can't I have feedback on my rejected site?

hutcheson, I'm new to all of this but I would agree with those who say it has to do with time. An editor's limmited time to deal with all the submissions and the lack of time devoted by those who submit to find out how ODP works. Even I found myself trying to skim the quidlines so that I could quickly fill out the form. Now that I have forced myself to go back and read and go through some of the posts, It seems like there is a lot of frustration on both sides.
I'm probably fit in that category that frustrates you and I'm sorry for that. This is the first forum I've ever been in even though I started our website back in 1996 trying to learn HTML and ODP was new to me. You will probably always get the same questions being in the position you are and because people submit, or sudgest, sites without understanding the importance of original content and what that means. Anyway, don't let it get to you. There are many that appreciate the admins and editors. At least 1.

Oh, repeated ignorant questions don't bother me. (I've done math tutoring. I've worked in a college computer lab. I've even worked in technical support for accountants.)

What bothers me about _this_ question is not that it is ignorant so much as it seems so tabula-rasa thoughtless: like "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" it is based on some assumption -- but I can't figure out what that assumption is. And my preferred approach to such questions is to tackle the hidden assumption.

You may be searching for a hidden assumption where none exists. Let’s get an obvious assumption out of the way, and see what’s left.

I submit that even those who are “capable of human sympathies and acts of generosity” are subject to social conditioning. When faced with failure or rejection, an expectation arises. That is, along with receipt of such notice comes explanation. If I fail a test, I am shown why. If I am fired, I am told why. If my credit application is rejected, I am told why. If I fail in a relationship, my ex-wife is all too happy to explain why.

So, why should ODP rejection be any different? Why would I think that no explanation accompanies rejection? Did you tell me there would be no explanation? If you don’t tell me, how would I know? What specific signposts would lead me to the thought: “No sense in asking why my site was rejected because obviously no one will answer it. If they did, they would be telling spammers how to spam them better.”

As sympathetic Joe Surfer, or generous Joe Site-owner, I don’t even know that there’s a problem with spam. I don’t know that 90% of submissions are spam. I don’t know because no one told me. In the absence of a very strong statement to the contrary, my plain, simple, quite honest, and rather sincere assumption is simply that I will be told why my site was rejected, because that is how I have been conditioned.

Is there more than just this?

If you submit a manuscript to a book publisher and it is rejected, you are not told why.

If your college application is rejected, you are not told why.

If you submit your website to Google and it doesn't get indexed, you are not told why.

If you drop a note in a suggestion box and your suggestion isn't acted upon, it's a rare organization indeed if someone calls you back and tells you why they're not going to act on your suggestion.

There have been interesting points about feedback in this thread. I can see both sides of the equation here; Editors don't have a vested interest in including peoples' sites in DMOZ (in terms the submitter's point of view) so they are under no compunction to communicate with those submitters/suggesters. I have often been frustrated at the seeming lack of response from editors and the ommission of an 'auto feedback' facility. With the slew of communications already received by editors, especially via this forum, I think it would make sense to have a one way 'auto' communication.

Simple responses from a drop-down list sent automatically to the suggester only to give a rough idea of why the rejection happened. It's not that I think DMOZ owe me or any other site builder anything, except maybe a little common, human respect. I know there are spammers out there. I'm not one, and neither are a lot of people. Just as BobRat made his rejection notes in reply #6 above, it might even help the editor record their own useful log file. They don't have to deal with any reply from an auto mail, just take the time to record as much information as someone like BobRat above. An editor could just as easily choose a drop-down or write a note for response as write it down with a pen.

It is just for people, like myself, who want to know if there site has even been touched. It can be very frustrating to wait for something without even knowing whether you have been seen by an editor, let alone dealt with, or accepted/rejected.

The editors depend on good submissions for an excellent search engine. I depend on inclusion in DMOZ as part of my livelyhood because their results are taken so seriously. I'm not pretending my sites are some sort of fantastic new information, often they are commercial sites, sometimes Government agency sites. They are sometimes still useful and interesting sites.

Maybe I'm being too simplistic, but it could be only a matter of objective vs subjective. The person suggesting a site (not submitting) to a directory(not a search ingine) is assuming a more objective process and does not understand why the site was not accepted since it looks good and may even be complete. Maybe still ignoring content and focusing on mechanics.

OR
I don't think the ODP has enough graphics in the guidelines to catch my attention - Just kidding.

luggagebase, do you perhaps have the terms reversed?

The submitter thinks that the reviewer will reject the site for SUBJECTIVE reasons (don't like the background color, navigation would make Wrong-Way Corrigan look like an expert, sloppy layout, etc.)

But those aren't the reasons why sites get rejected. An editor is looking for unique information. That's VERY objective, especially in Shopping and Business categories. "Unique" has a meaning -- is it anywhere else on the web? "Information" can be readily distinguished from "promotion/advertising" by almost anyone.

[Side note: even people who are (like me) colorblind in the linguistic spectrum can tell the difference. To a marketroid, "information" is "irrelevant stuff that doesn't help persuade the person" (while to me, of course, "advertising" is what makes me physically ill when I read it.) More mainstream (balanced?) minds can nevertheless, I believe, tell the difference.]

It may take a little bit more knowledge or perception, but we look for editors who can tell the difference between content and verbal incontinence -- like the doofus who took 400 words of a travel guide to assure me that people in his region looked at plants and animals, or the marketroid who takes three paragraphs to enjoin me to compare prices before jumping through his affiliate links.

Actually, the standards are very OBJECTIVE, and this is why it can't be informative to send specific rejection reasons. Because there AREN'T rejection reasons. There are only absences of acceptance reasons. And there's only one of those. (Did I mention "unique content"?)

I can understand that many people don't understand the volume of spam we have. I even think some of them don't understand they are spamming. (They've been slimed by someone selling "e-tailing solutions.")

And I can understand why people don't stop and think about the editor's standpoint. Because EVERYONE knows you don't send a polite "no, thanks" to every e-mail from fly-by-night viagra (or quack diet) peddlers -- and the SMC/Vstore/Amazon/hotelnow/etc. dropship order taking websites are the exact HTML equivalent of the SNMP spam. And if people ever make that connection, I don't think they'll ever ask us _that_ question again.

Certainly, though another message that we need to get out is "Objective standards".

hutcheson, yes you got the meaning of my verbal mess. The person submitting is assuming a discriminating editor that doesn't like the layout or navigation of their site with no clue that a 1 page site with unique content could get listed.
Maybe they are confused on what "content" means. In the shopping listings they could be confused between unique content and product. A shopping site could have product changes on a weekly or daily basis. How does an editor know what is valuable content unless he or she is an expert in that field. Does "whats important to a consumer" = "unique content in ODP"? I know what is important to the consumer: price, price, easy to navigate site, helpful hints, lots of info on a product with detailed pictures, safe enviorment, customer service that actually answer the phone, and did I mention price?
I know very little about editing so I maybe on a tangent. Sorry.

I think I'll go back to my first input - It's about time, includeing the time and effort to go back and add unique content.

A couple of things I see (and some value-added speculation):
First off, I think a lot of marketing people don't understand the difference between "content" and "presentation". The whole point of marketing is to make something seem valuable to a bunch of people who might buy it. Marketing is essentially the "art" of presenting things. Good marketing presents things in a unique and useful way.
So when someone sets up a really nice, clean, efficient interface for accessing Amazon's products...they think they've got some unique content. In reality, they've got a unique presentation. If I stretch my brain really hard, I can kinda see where they're coming from.

Second, on a slightly unrelated note, I think a lot of people are reacting to the fairly negative* responses they get from inqueries. If their site is rejected, and they say, "I need this ODP listing! The internet is a powerful marketing tool, and I stand a better chance of feeding my kids if I can get listed in the ODP!" A lot of times they'll get the response of, "You dumbass! What moron bases their entire business model on getting an ODP listing?! I hope your kids STARVE!!!"
These people believe that there's something small they can change about their site to make it worth listing. They have such strong beliefs about the ODP being a great marketing tool, that they don't realize that it's just a bunch of net-savvy hobbyists putting it together. So they get offended, angry, frustrated, etc.

But that's a lot of speculation on my part. After all, I'm not "those people". At least, most of the time.

I think when people complain, they should be directed here. The more responses those threads have, the more educational they are about the struggle between DMOZ and site submi...suggesters.

Nareau

* "fairly negative": by this I mean both "relatively nasty" and "appropriately dismissive". It's like a Zen pun.

Nareau, that seems to me a fair statement of the marketroid position. But we don't care about them. They can't do anything for us; we can't do anything for them.

I'm concerned about the people who have a real business, who actually hire other people to make goods and perform services for customers. Some of them seem to have absorbed the marketroid view of the ODP; and I'd like to get them oriented back to reality.

nareau, the thread you linked to as an example of a negative thread actually just highlights an upset submitter, not nasty editors. No editor who posted in that thread posted anything even approaching nasty. I will grant you there was a certain dismissiveness, though, because we can't spend all day belabouring a point that has already been made, regardless of how cranky the submitter gets.

>The editors depend on good submissions for an excellent search engine.

Nay, not so, but far otherwise!

The editors don't depend on good submittals. This is an evil and self-serving marketroid myth. The same thing is said of Yahoo, Google, Looksmart, etc. -- and it's false there also. It's these lowlifes that mutter "the internet wouldn't exist if it weren't for us" -- yet never appeared on the internet until it had been running for years -- like tapeworms proclaiming that humans were invented for their own habitation -- then proudly announce that the ODP depends on them (and some people get to believing it!)

This is just plain not so. Editors found, find, and will find millions of good sites without a single submittal, and their main work was, is, and will always be finding sites without submittals. In fact, editors frequently wonder whether we wouldn't do better to cut off submittals altogether. And they're serious.

Now, the first-order effect of submittals is definitely not very helpful, and might even be harmful. But there are higher-order effects that must be considered -- many editors come to us first as submitters! Some people learn about the ODP through the submittal process -- although by no means as many as we like. Submittals, whatever their value, do bring us some good sites, and remind us of some neglected areas. So the picture is complex: and we aren't about to shut them down. But the idea that we utterly, or mainly, or significantly, DEPEND on them for sites to list, is utterly false and malicious. And if we can disabuse people of that vile cavil, we'll have taken a giant step towards explaining them what the ODP is all about.

wrathchild said:

If you submit a manuscript to a book publisher and it is rejected, you are not told why.If your college application is rejected, you are not told why. If you submit your website to Google and it doesn't get indexed, you are not told why.
If you drop a note in a suggestion box and your suggestion isn't acted upon, it's a rare organization indeed if someone calls you back and tells you why they're not going to act on your suggestion.

Click to expand...

It is a matter of expectation. If I were an author, I know that the odds are against me. If I'm rejected, I receive notice. And if I want to know why, I suspect someone at the publishing house will tell me. The same goes for applying for college. The odds are against me {especially me}. If I am rejected I know the likely reasons (GPA, SAT score, etc.) If I submit to Google, I expect I'll be indexed. Few are not. And if not, I can email help@google.com. If I put a note in a suggestion box, I do not expect a response.

If I am a non-spamming site owner, in the process of submitting to Search Engines and Directories, my expectation is that I will be listed with all, including ODP. I have a good wholesome site. Why would it be rejected? As Joe (or Joanne) Surfer who submits, after going through the process of finding the category, writing a title, and authoring a description I expect that chances are high that my suggested site will be listed. Why? Again, because I don't know otherwise.

Obviously, I should know better. But, the fact that so many sincere people aren’t getting the message leads me to question the delivery. I’ve reviewed the DMOZ submission process. I must say, it’s extremely well written. In fact it is too well written. It’s long, and boring, and at times, too subtle. A few facts:

Google submit screen
number of characters (including spaces) before I enter a url: 879
number of words before I reach “we do not add all submitted URLs to our index” : 24
Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 7.6

DMOZ submit screen
number of characters (including spaces) of only the submission policies and instructions, not including the submission form itself: 7,968
number of words before I reach “we do not add all submitted URLs to our index” : 93
Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 11.2

It is simply too long and boring. The message isn’t reaching people. Even sympathetic and generous people just skim the first sentence of each paragraph. If as hutcheson says, you want to dispel misconceptions, and if you want to appeal to good people who might take an interest in the project, or if you want to appeal to those who at least will understand that they should not expect any further communication after making their suggestion, then you must take a hard look at the pages you present to your audience.

Make them warm, friendly, simple, inviting, and informative. Those who want more detail should then easily find what you have now, a technical narrative. If you want to communicate with Joe Surfer, you can’t hand him a white paper and expect him to read it cover to cover before the relationship can progress.

{imagine me, telling you to be brief}

{imagine me, telling you to be brief}

Imagine me trying to do it.

But you do have several cogent points.

In fact, editors frequently wonder whether we wouldn't do better to cut off submittals altogether. And they're serious.

Click to expand...

Yes, we are!

There is a company that builds websites. Lots and lots of website all through the US. There is rarely a locality where 2 to 5% of the submissions are from this firm. Many are templates with little content, many contain but a single page. They submit them all. About 20% of their submissions are dead within 45 days. About 10% of their submissions (within Regional) are to the wrong locality. Maybe 15% don't even have a local address, when local addresses are mightily important within Regional. About 5% have the wrong locality name in the description -- they can't even get that right. When our automated link checker, a lovely little critter affectionately dubbed Robozilla, runs, I'd bet a full 10% of the bad links are expired sites that were initially submitted by this one company.

Many editors have tried to give them guidance -- the e-mail address they use for submissions is a black hole.

I'm sure some good and honest people have bought into their sales pitch, they just don't realize what garbage is bieng delivered, how haphazard the ODP submissions are. And these developers are supposed to be professionals. In my mind, and in the mind of many other editors they are just spammers with a good cover story. Yet, we have to look at each and every one of their submissions, click through the garbage in hopes of finding the few websites that have enough unique content to qualify. This company totally wastes a huge amount of my time and the time of my fellow editors.

Sometimes this type of submitter irritates me more than the spammers do. The spammers are usually honest about what they are -- I despise the marginally eithical companies, whose every submission is an attempt to game the editor comunity, whose very best submissions rank in the bottom 5% of websites in any given locality.

That, my friends, is just a tiny bit of the garbage we have to deal with when wading through submissions.

spectregunner said:

That, my friends, is just a tiny bit of the garbage we have to deal with when wading through submissions.

Click to expand...

So, in addition to submissions, you cover this board? Hmmmm…. a true techno-masochist.

spectregunner said:

Yes, we are!

There is a company that builds websites. Lots and lots of website all through the US. There is rarely a locality where 2 to 5% of the submissions are from this firm. Many are templates with little content, many contain but a single page. They submit them all.

Click to expand...

I don't know too much about all of this but are those submissions using a automated script? If so, is it possible and feasable to but a user filter or screen where a the person submitting has to verify a code that is presented to him/her when submitting the form. I know other sites that do this so that only end users are logged in. They usually use a 4 digit code overlapping a grid so that a machine can not recognize it.

At this point, our main problem is not automation but bloody animal persistence. There are two distinct spam problems. The case being just referred to here is a "trained pig with a keyboard" scenario, which your suggestion would not help. The other case, the "affiliate-program-coordinated distributed-denial-of-service attack" caused by each one of thousands of vspam/SMC affiliates each submitting their own half-dozen sites several times each. The user filter wouldn't help that either.

(It is a known solution, though, and if that form of the problem gets bad enough, you may see it implemented.)

This may seem surprising, but the ODP has access to VERY good technical people. In terms of technical analysis of approaches to spam issues, even the internal editors' forums have consistently been a multiple iterations ahead of _any_ technical mechanism that's _ever_ been suggested in _any_ outside forum -- and they don't even paint a complete picture of what staff knows or does. (This is not to say everything has been implemented, just that staff know about it, and has a pretty good idea of why it does or doesn't want to implement it--and when.)

However, the _public communications_ aspects of the ODP are still very much under development, and we're still groping for ideas and understanding.

luggagebase said:

I don't know too much about all of this but are those submissions using a automated script? If so, is it possible and feasable to but a user filter or screen where a the person submitting has to verify a code that is presented to him/her when submitting the form. I know other sites that do this so that only end users are logged in. They usually use a 4 digit code overlapping a grid so that a machine can not recognize it.

Click to expand...

IMHO, the ODP makes an effort to work in test-only-browsers such as Lynx. I believe this includes submissions....

As for details, I can confirm that there are filtering suggestions proposed on the editor-only forums which haven't appeared on this forum. I don't know (nor am I sure I want to know) which have been implemented.

back to the main topic, it just maybe a simple case of "hope".

I hope that my site will be listed.
If not, I hope someone might tell me why(even if it should be obvious) so I can correct it.
Even if I am aware that I probably won't get a responce, I'll try anyway and hope someone cares to give me the "heads up" or recomendation.
So maybe their simple assumption is "someone really cares about my efforts or my well being"
I'm sure some feel if they are persistant enough, they'll get some kind of answer.

This, of course, in ignorance of how ODP works.

I just read a post (not at ODP) and the poor fool was upset that he had not been listed at DMOZ yet. He even waited a whole hour. He gave up.
Regardless to say, his site was all affiliate links.