Why doesn't ODP have method of viewing status?

It seems like 90% of all questions concern the status of a sumission. It seems like an editor's job would become much easier (less email) if ODP had an easy way for a submitter to view the status of their submission, and perhaps their number in the queue. Any reason why this hasn't already been done?

Now, you're asking for a combination of information that isn't directly available even to editors, information that is intended to be available only to editors ("this submittal is spam because of the following evidence"), and concepts of information that simply aren't well-formed from a logistical perspective ("Whose submittal is it? and what changes to it cause it to cease to belong to the submitter?") and concepts that simply have no relationship to any palpable reality ("number in the queue").

It is usually easy for an editor to say what can be said, or to see that the question should be left for a more experienced editor or more thorough investigation; it is not at all easy to describe what an automatic process should do, in order to be useful to submitters and not fatal to spam investigation.

And finally, we have to ask if this kind of expensive design and development effort is really the best use of available resources. The "what is my status" questions don't bother editors -- since the editors that would be bothered can ignore the forums where they are currently asked.

A good reason why there's no such method for viewing a submission's status is because spammers would use it to re-submit as soon as one of their submissions was deleted, and also use it to figure out how to get around our spam-detection methods, both of which would mean more work for us editors.

A status report that tells whether the site is in, awaiting review, or rejected would be nice. There are lots of ideas like this circulated on the internal forums about how to improve the technology. Basically, the tech staff is overworked. DMOZ is what it is, a bunch of volunteers working with the tools they have at their disposal to build a useful resource. This very forum is a volunteer effort - this isn't paid for by AOL - DMOZ editors do it. The same goes for many of the tools we use on the inside. Eventually maybe someone will build the very tool you've described. Then again, maybe not.

For now, this forum seems to work very well for people requesting updates.

>A status report that tells whether the site is in, awaiting review, or rejected would be nice

Agreed. I sat down once and tried to map the actual internal statuses into reportable statuses like that. It is far from a trivial problem. All of the factors I mentioned interact with each other in complex ways.

Think of a listing in DMOZ as a privilege, not as you constitutional right.

Be happy that you even get a chance to get listed there.