Will submitters ever able to check status?

Thank you both for clearing up the way that DMOZ goes about storing info.

Certainly an automated status check could be made to work with data files rather than a specific database. Having just a few possible statuses, such as "Not Submitted" "Pending" "Listed" and "Denied". The "listed" status could be easily achieved by scanning the current dev cat for the url string, the "submitted" status can be checked by scanning through the "pending" file (or whatever way DMOZ uses a file to store sites that are waiting for review).

"There are lots of possible statuses, and because the system of processing the submission is so based on Humans, interpreting the status is more than a simple check to see if a site is waiting in a given category. "

From my readings (and I know samiam has had tons more experience with all this than most people) it seems that not to many statuses that are given back to people here on this site exist. "Pending" is a popular one, "Denied" is another popular one, and "It is listed in the dev dir" is another one. Giving specifics about when the editor was last there do not need to be relayed, they are not now.

I don't seem to get the point of denying status checks to known abusers?? If the abuser is known, and the site being submitted is spammy or whatever, the editor won't submit it. Who cares if the submitter checks the status, it probably won't take up any more processing or bandwidth than having an editor from here go and check. If a status check is done correctly, the processing cycles would be low, the bandwidth very low, making 500 queries in the status tool equal to the processing power and bandwidth equal to one status check from an editor at this website.

Common logic would indicate that it would be more worthwhile to have a huge sign pointing to a bathroom so you DO NOT ask a person where it is. Asking a person where it is takes away time and effort that they can be doing their job. Asking editors here for the status of some site that probably won't get listed anyways only takes them away from getting the sites that should be listed into the directory, and thus creating a better experience for users of DMOZ. Just the other day at the O'Hare airport in America I was looking for the bathroom, I went to the front desk at the airport lounge to ask, and they didn't even say a word, just pointed to a big sign that said "Restrooms ->"

Taking away the productivity of employees, volunteers, whoever they may be is a situation that administrators want to avoid at all costs (when productivity and profits are in mind of course).

The statement "Humans it do it better" is a great mindset to have when editing categories and reviewing sites for submission, and certainly does produce more relevant results (another debate altogether). Busy work such as checking a status, and having a finite answer exist (listed, denied, pending, not submitted) does not require the "personal touch"; it only detracts from an editor adding more useful sites to the directory. I stumbled upon a thread the other day that said "The more you ask about the status of your site, the more time you are taking us away from getting pending sites reviewed"

I think that this sums up the current system perfectly. And for a directory that has had people waiting with good sites for over a year, it is certainly something that needs to be addressed. The DMOZ is a service, and in my mind a valuable one. If you requested a plumber come fix the leaky pipes, and he took over a year to come, you wouldn’t be too pleased. I do think that this is how people are starting to see the ODP. It certainly would be hard to provide a 1 week turn around time on submitted sites, but some aspects (such as automated site status checks) could free up more time for editors to edit, possibly increasing the amount of sites reviewed and added to the directory, decreasing the waiting time for sites to be listed, and thus providing a BIGGER directory with MORE useful sites for the entire world.

"Humans do it better" certainly is a great foundation to work off of, but tasks that do not need a human touch could be automated (in my mind!)

As far as this comment goes

"And perhaps even many times a day by automated programs. (Similar to those that monitor rankings in search engines). "

This problem has been addressed very easily by major automated services such as the network solutions database which resolves urls, nic handles, etc to a database entry with the owners name, DNS server, admin and tech contact.

A field where a user has to copy in a random generated series of numbers and letters to be able to check the status would make it impossible for automated systems to use the tool. Every time a user wants to query the status, he/she has to enter in the string. This has cut down the traffic and server cycles to the network solutions Database. Many SE require that in order to suggest your URL to the BOT, you enter in a random generated code, to prevent automated entries from "website traffic" programs and the like. A status check on DMOZ would certainly be a candidate for that type of technology.

"So far, I think this system has been working relatively well - and you even get human interaction."

I disagree. From a submitter side of things, I do not think the system is all that great. I would much rather be able to "bug a machine" at my leisure than request that someone else take time out of there work to do something for me. I think this for a few reasons,

1. They have other things more important than looking at my site.

2. I would rather have a response right away as to the status than wait for an editor to look it up

3. I would rather be able to check 1 time a day than 1 time a month.

I am sure many people who do request site status feel a similar way. It is easy for an editor to tell people not to ask for a month, but it is a little unnerving to want to know the status of something that could mean success or failure (DMOZ does provide high ranking PR links to websites, influencing the results of searches for keywords in Google and other engines that crawl using DMOZ).

As a user of the DMOZ, I feel that I (as well as other DMOZ users) would be at a benefit if more listing and less "status checking" went on. Editors have given tons of time to reviewing sites; they should not be our secretaries to check on the status of something for us.

Anyone have any types of statistics on the number of added pages to the directory daily for the past couple years? It would be interesting to see the number of sites listed compared with the number of editors.

Well said and thought through chriskud5! I agree with all that you say. In particular, how an automated checking system would free volunteers from the current superfluous manual status checking.

After all, it is the year 2003

I will let someone more knowledgable explain why why don't want known abusers checking status. I know the reasons but being able to explain those reasons coherently is difficult. However:

Asking editors here for the status of some site that probably won't get listed anyways only takes them away from getting the sites that should be listed into the directory, and thus creating a better experience for users of DMOZ.

Click to expand...

The very reason why I'm here is because at the moment I don't feel like processing submissions. We're volunteers. We can't be told "you must do X today". Submissions aren't the be-all and end-all of editing, in fact much of my editing is based around ontology, clearing out sites that no longer work, fixing spelling mistakes and adding unsubmitted sites to fill out categories where they are lacking. Often, I find reviewing submissions rather boring.

A field where a user has to copy in a random generated series of numbers and letters to be able to check the status would make it impossible for automated systems to use the tool.

Click to expand...

And impossible for blind or partially sighted people to use it. One of the students at the univerity I go to was blinded in a car accident by flying glass, and forms like those annoy her because they can't be picked up by braille readers, which are like robots.

I would rather be able to check 1 time a day than 1 time a month.

Click to expand...

So would everyone. Multiply the requests made here by 31 [days in a month] and you're starting to get a lot of server load. And then there would be the people who haven't found this forum using it so you could probably multiply the figure again by 10.

Editors have given tons of time to reviewing sites; they should not be our secretaries to check on the status of something for us.

Click to expand...

As I said, this is something I don't mind doing. You cluld say it was "fun" in a bizarre sort-of way.

Anyone have any types of statistics on the number of added pages to the directory daily for the past couple years?

Click to expand...

We typically grow by around 2500-3000 sites per day.

[qoute]The very reason why I'm here is because at the moment I don't feel like processing submissions. We're volunteers. We can't be told "you must do X today".[/qoute]

and that is fair enough, but it does sort of fly in the face of "Humans do it better".

Dave

Just to add: my stats were from December 2001. The latest data I have is from July 2002 when we are adding 3500-4000 sites per day. Sorry for the confusion.

One reason why you don't want abusers checking status too easily is that when their site gets rejected, they will know straight away and send in a new submission of the old URL elsewhere or a new URL to the original cat. With the current system, they are delayed from knowing their status for a longer period of time, hence they submit fresh copies less frequently and the load of new spam submissions is lower.

Experience shows that people could and did write automated software for Google dance checks, sending out an e-mail the moment the dance was spotted. It would not be helpful if spammers were receiving e-mails to remind them to send in a new spam submission...

...In particular, how an automated checking system would free volunteers from the current superfluous manual status checking.

After all, it is the year 2003

Click to expand...

I don't know if you missed the excellent post by theseeker. At the very least I suspect you didn't accept it as valid.

It is valid and it is accurate.

... that is fair enough, but it does sort of fly in the face of "Humans do it better".

Click to expand...

Quality Dave, not quantity. It isn’t the size of the directory, it’s how we use it.

We're not assembly line workers and although your concern for our productivity is admirable, it might to a certain extent be considered condescending. I don't think that's the case Dave, I believe you are honestly trying to help. We understand your goals, please try to understand ours.

The relationship between your goals and ours: websites.
Beyond that we differ, we do not want every site, that's what bots do. We want the best sites. Some editors seldom work the heap of unreviewed sites that have been submitted from the public side, preferring instead to find good sites by other methods. Others are relentless in every way to keep unreviewed sites at zero in the categories they edit. Some editors do a mix of both, it’s their choice.

[qoute]The very reason why I'm here is because at the moment I don't feel like processing submissions. We're volunteers. We can't be told "you must do X today".[/qoute]

and that is fair enough, but it does sort of fly in the face of "Humans do it better".

Click to expand...

Well, no, I must disagree -- that doesn't say anything about how humans edit, neither positive nor negative. Knowing what humans are like, it's extremely likely that someone who is allowed to edit as much as he likes and doesn't have to do any more than that will do a better job than someone who is forced to work, but that's actually beside the point.

Now, if our task as ODP editors had been to process submissions, then I would have agreed with you. It isn't, though -- we're building a directory using submitted web sites as one way of adding to it.

I'd like to add a slightly different spin on the "Humans do it better" theme.

>>I'd glady bother a machine to look it up, but I'll hold off on bothering living breathing people for a while. <<

A person who cares enough about their site and is concerned enough about their listing to take the time to post manually in this forum to get status is the type of person we like providing status to and hope to clarify any questions they have. We like interacting with ~people~. Automated systems or robots are uninteresting, IMHO, and not what ODP is about.

Providing an automated method for checking status doesn't benefit editors and would take resources away from other things (tool development time, system resources, quicker resubmission of cr*p, etc.)

People keep bringing up that manual checking of status takes away resources from editing, but that just isn't so. Editors participating in this forum are taking a break, so to speak. There is far more to being an editor than processing unreviewed and this is one of many different "community" activities available. There is a benefit to ODP in the process of status checking. Editors fix problems they discover, perform maintenance types of cleanup, gain personal knowledge of different areas of the directory, and may discover larger ontology problems to initiate discussion on internally. And then there are the stimulating conversations...

Hope this adds a little more insight into where ODP editors are coming from.

-Lissa

I would have to disagree with a lot of that.

"Beyond that we differ, we do not want every site, that's what bots do. We want the best sites."

Bots DO NOT pick up every site. Bots are a lot more selective in who they go to, who they crawl, and who they index. The googlebot for example, whose algo for operating have been a mystery for years, takes in over a 100 factors when crawling a page. Keyword density, alt tags, inbound anchor text, etc. Google has kept an algo current that is able to distinguish a good site from a spammy site IN SOME CASES. Certainly this is not a foolproof system, as many "spammy" sites exist in the google SERPs.

Google also has a much different philosophy than DMOZ. The ODP prides itself on being human edited, which certainly does ensure that good sites are added, but certainly that is not always the case either. Some editors may include sites that some other editors won't, some ignore submissions and find sites on their own, you have mentioned the inconsistency between DMOZ editors, and a factor that can lead to an "inconsistent" directory. Humans may do it better, but not always consistent.

"I don't know if you missed the excellent post by theseeker. At the very least I suspect you didn't accept it as valid.

It is valid and it is accurate.
"

Im not sure what that means. Theseeker made a good point that editors will not edit edit edit all the time, obviously. Theseeker also made a good point about developing software that lets editors get more sites listed. Why on earth does DaveHawley have to agree on the presence of a status checking tool? The DMOZ has always been for the people by the people, this is summed up well with the slogan "Humans do it better". The directory listings power many searches and are responsible for the listing of many websites on many search engines. Search engines exist for users of the internet to find information. The ODP is another way of providing info to the internet users. It is "the people’s directory".

theseeker made some good points, but they certainly do not all ring valid in my mind. I think the whole issue we are talking about here has moved from beyond a status checking tool to the operating principles of the ODP as a whole.

"Quality Dave, not quantity. It isn’t the size of the directory; it’s how we use it. "

Totally disagree
The size of a directory has everything to do with its meaning. If the ODP was a directory of about 300 sites in a few categories, you think anyone would really care to use it? You think goggle would provide directory listings based on the ODPs? I certainly don't. A successful directory is a perfect mix of size and quality. If the size is to big and quality not good enough, it is garbage. If the size is too small and the quality is great, it doesn’t provide a comprehensive directory to use, and would not be used.

Maintaining a good quality directory that grows in volume every day to keep the hungry minds of internet searchers all over the world happy should be the primary focus of the ODP. In my mind, the ODP does do a good job at maintaining quality listings, but lacks a little in the volume department. If the around 4000 sites are added a day statistic is true, that means .07 sites are added per editor per day, or 2.1 sites per 31 day period.

.009 sites are added to category per day, or about 111 days pass before a site is added to a category. (Of course these figures based on averages, some cats may have more added a day than others).

Some outdated figures say that the internet grows at about 1.5 million pages per day. This was in the year 1998 where anyone with a good idea written on a cocktail napkin could get startup funds for a website. Even if this figure is 5% of that, that is 75,000 WebPages being added to the internet on a daily basis. I imagine that the figure is much higher than just 5%.

If 80% of those 75,000 sites are spam and should not even be considered for inclusion in the ODP, another 15,000 exist. The growth of the internet may be outpacing the growth of the ODP by a huge margin.

I imagine that the DMOZ does have a "quality not quantity" system, and does not judge an editor on how many site he/she goes through, but rather the quality of the sites being added. I do not think it would hurt the DMOZ to have a minimum that must be done in a month, even if it is just 5 new listings, that are more than double the current average rate, and it certainly should not take a month to find 5 sites that should be included. This would mean over 286,000 new sites would be listed monthly, or over 9200 sites a day. The DMOZ could catch up with the current pace of the internet, providing a better directory for the entire world.

The argument of quality of quantity does not settle with me when the average number of new sites listed in a month is a little over 2. If every editor had to fill a quota of 5 new sites listed per month, and if every one site listed came with 5 spam sites, that are 25 sites to look at a month. I am sure that most editors can tell immediately if a site is spammy or not.

The DMOZ is a great tool for many to use, but if the current production rate seems to carry on into the future, the DMOZ directory will be dwarfed by the size of non spammy, ODP list worthy sites on the internet. It would be unfortunate to see the ODP turn into something not widely used by search engines and users because it was way too limited in its inclusion of websites.

Could an editor maybe fill me in on any quotas or anything they have to fulfill in a month? It would also be interesting to hear a few estimations of how many spammy sites are submitted to the ODP per every legitimate site that gets listed, as well as some current figures for the growth of the internet.

Have a good one

Several months ago I spent some time trying to figure out what submittal status information could be provided without giving away information about our anti-spam techniques. There wasn't that much. I also tried to identify what information could be given out about editing steps that had been taken: again, there wasn't much.

Of course, I also ask: what possible value to legitimate submitters would daily status be? "Accepted" status is already available weekly (every time search is updated); "rejected" status usually means "this was spam", and we need NOT to give an automated response -- we want that spammer wondering, worrying, and suffering so much that he'll decide the ODP isn't worth bothering. "URL changed" is really difficult to handle: we desperately WANT some people to know they're listed under a different URL (e.g. the "cjb.net redirector victims") -- we want them to know we aren't going to list that blasted popup-hell redirector, even though we're willing to list their real website. On the other hand, we desperately want some people NOT to know we changed their URL (most of the worst spammers are mass-alias-URL submitters, and we'd rather them not know how much information we have on their domains.)

And finally, because of a phenomenon well-known to any information theorist, automated daily statuses will give away information about our anti-spam practices and knowledge, that we simply can't afford to give to anyone. On the other hand, a spammer always risks detection by calling attention to himself by requesting a manual check.

In short, even if AOL were willing to invest massive amounts of money to add this feature, there really wouldn't be much more useful information we could provide to honest submitters, and we are extremely concerned that the additional information we gave would be useful only to spammers.

Regular readers of this forum may notice that when we reject a site for not having unique content, we don't tell where else we found that content, or how we found it. It's the same principle at work -- the plagiarist knows who he copied, and we don't want to give information about how to hide that plagiarism better. So we just say "not unique" or "already listed under another URL."

If submitters want to talk about their multiple putatively-different URLs, we expect them to provide us a complete list. We check that against what we know, and if that list wasn't complete, we know they are lying spammers, and we can react accordingly. If that list is complete and verifiable, then we have a basis for working with them.

Could an editor maybe fill me in on any quotas or anything they have to fulfill in a month?

Click to expand...

There are no quotas. As stated in various other posts, if there was some taskmaster standing over us - then we would no longer be volunteers.

It would also be interesting to hear a few estimations of how many spammy sites are submitted to the ODP per every legitimate site that gets listed, as well as some current figures for the growth of the internet.

Click to expand...

From my own limited experience, this much depends on the category. I find that Arts categories tend to be relatively spam free. Shopping, tends to be very spam prone - and as a result extremely time consuming. In one case, I found a seller masquerading under different company names and aliases. He had submiited ten different URLS in one category, and that category only had twenty entries. Within one week after the duplicates were deleted, he submitted again.

Website designers and SEO sites are really bad. Apart from spam in the site URL, they generally can't spell, and the descriptions lie. Sometimes thay can't even spell the URL they submitted. Or the site is down cause the ISP is unreliable. The rejection rate including all these factors could be 25% or more.

This is another reason for having no quotas - what should be the time spent editing? In spam prone areas, I might spend as much as an hour on one site that I suspect of being a clone in order to end up deleting it. If I get a well written submission, in the right category, with an easy to analyze site, it might take a couple of minutes to add it.

...the internet grows at about 1.5 million pages per day....Even if this figure is 5% of that, that is 75,000 WebPages being added to the internet on a daily basis.

Click to expand...

Pages not sites. And even if it were talking about sites, I'd bet that an awful lot of those are mirrors of existing ones, affiliate sites, and other crap.

I do not think it would hurt the DMOZ to have a minimum that must be done in a month, even if it is just 5 new listings, that are more than double the current average rate, and it certainly should not take a month to find 5 sites that should be included. This would mean over 286,000 new sites would be listed monthly, or over 9200 sites a day. The DMOZ could catch up with the current pace of the internet, providing a better directory for the entire world.

Click to expand...

Keep in mind that any number you could be given for number of sites added a day is net number of sites the directory increased by. That net amount includes URLs that were deleted because they shouldn't have been listed in the first place or were no longer in business -- so in reality, the number of new sites added on a daily basis is actually larger than the increase in the directory size would have you believe.

It's not appropriate to use the number of sites added as a sign of how much work editors, either, do since it doesn't count the amount of work many editors do moving missubmitted sites to the right categories, correcting URLs that have moved, cleaning up existing categories, working on ontology, discussing issues with other editors, and doing a myriad of other tasks that editors have to do in addition to just adding sites. That doesn't even take into consideration the administrative tasks that senior level editors have to do in addition to all of the above.

Your theory that mandating a minimum number of adds a month would help keep the ODP up-to-date is also flawed because it presumes that the editors will be able to pick up the slack evenly throughout the directory. The editors who can edit all over the directory are already swamped by work and most of the rest have no desire to start wading through the areas of the directory where the most growth in new sites is (think how many new SEO, web design, and shopping affiliate sites spring up daily). Should we then also mandate not only how much an editor must edit but where? What a good way to make people quit. And then where would we be?

I'm not certain that editors will ever agree with submitters on the importance of this issue. But this discussion hasn't been a bad thing. At least it has let us look into each other's minds and philosophies a bit more.

The number, both from totalxsive and from chriskud5, really don't mean anything. Numbers rarely do but in this case they are often erroneous and conclusions are often reached even though one or more factors has been missed.

Some examples:
".07 sites are added per editor per day" based on 4000 added per day.

I don't know where totalxsive got the figure, but I think it likely it was from increase in number of sites in the directory over a period of the RDF. In which case, this doesn't take into account the number of URLs that went bad and were removed, or sites that shouldn't have been listed and were then removed. If 3000 links get removed in a day, and the directory increased by 4000 sites a day, then the actual figure would be 7000 per day. But I just pulled the 3000 figure out of my hat; I haven't put the work into finding the actual figure because I don't think it matters.

The other problem with this figure is it's based on 57,238 editors, which is the number of editors that have been approved for ODP since it's beginning. There are probably less than 10,000 active editors, and many of those are very close to inactive for whatever reason. I believe, pulling another number out of my hat, that less than 5,000 editors are truly adding sites on a regular basis, and probably less than 1,000 log in during a day to add sites.

(Also, those sites per day figures must take into account the agonizingly slow servers for the last few months, the editors who have left because of that, the editors who decided a day at the park would be better relaxation than waiting for that long page of unreviewed to load. So when the server issues are all resolved--already much better--even more sites will probably be added per day.

Personally, in my non-spammy Arts cats, during a day's editing, I probably list no more than 1 in 10 sites. Half will be misplaced and need to be sent elsewhere. Some will be gone or inaccessible. Many will not be worth listing. The number of people who submit a site with a paragraph and a coming soon sign, which then stays that way for 6 months, simply amazes me. And every one of those sites takes time. Which means if I listed 5 sites in a day, I actually processed about 50.

".009 sites are added to category per day"

Nobody can say for certain how many categories where created to hold @links pointing somewhere else, and how many categories are not meant to have sites, but just hold the subcategories. In other words, even those of us who navigate the directory daily don't know how many categories would actually hold sites, but it would be quite a bit less than the figure used.

"the internet grows at about 1.5 million pages per day"

Even if that figure is outdated, it's an estimate of the number of *pages*, not websites. How many truly worthwhile, content-rich websites go online daily, and how many will last out the year? How many of these are in categories that are so poorly maintained that the category will not be a good reference point for the subject without that site?

What I'm trying to say is that the figures are unlikely to point to things that are issues we (editors and webmaster) both share.

Personally, I believe the directory would be better without submissions and unreviewed. I started editing there when there were very few submission. Search engines like Google will find most of the best sites in a subject without a listing in ODP, and they are often the best place to start. But with all the resources, both server and editor resources, put into unreviewed and combating spam, most of us get little time to do any actual building. So I do believe that if we deleted all the unreviewed and shut of submissions for good, we'd be better off.

But mine is a very minority view.

Other editors see value in unreviewed, and they used the queues to improve their categories. Since the unreviewed doesn't bother me--I can still search for sites the old fashioned way and teach new editors to do the same--I don't publicize my view often and won't even press it in a discussion.

But with that philosophy, I didn't really think a Submission Status forums--or an automatic tool--was anything we were in need of. But, in this forum I have learned a lot, and I've seen editors handling the status requests learning about different parts of the directory, learning about sites and subjects they hadn't ventured into before, and practicing communication skills.

chriskud5 and DaveHawley, I don't post a lot in forums like this, but your discussion here has been intelligent and polite, and we don't see a lot of that, so I felt the discussion deserved as much as I could give to it. Since this has been a long post, I'll summarize:

An automated system of status checks would be a benefit to submitters, but have very little benefit to editors, where it would probably use some of our already taxed resources, so it is unlikely to be implemented.

The status forum here, does not really take editing time from editors, since they would probably just be reading another forum somewhere else anyway while taking a break from editing. On the other hand, it helps those editors to explore the directory a bit more, and to learn something about new subjects, and practice communication skills.

Somewhere in between these points of view there are ideas for a tool or a method of handling these things that might make things easier for both submitters and editors, but it will take time to develop that. With new resources open to programmers such as myself, new servers with more power, and a separation of the editor and user interfaces which should be complete soon, new possibilities are opening up all the time.

Rest assured that your suggestions and opinion will be taken into consideration at some point in the future, at least by me, when considering how we can improve the process.

>"I do not think it would hurt the DMOZ to have a minimum that must be done in a month, even if it is just 5 new listings."

<grabs bucket of cold water>
<reconsiders>
<drops cold water, and goes looking for liquid nitrogen>

Sorry, but this idea is absolutely a non-starter. We're all volunteers, attracted to the "ODP Culture" as cultivated for about five years, which has been, "however much of whatever you're willing to do to help the directory." Changing that culture would inevitably result in the loss of many volunteers. And I don't see a large pool of replacements out there saying, "I'd like to help the ODP, and I would volunteer. But there's this one thing stopping me -- if I volunteer, they won't force me to work!"

Secondly, adding sites is by no means the only job editors do, nor is it even the highest priority job! The highest priority job, as regular forum readers will know, is quality control. You can submit a site to a category and watch it wait for months to be reviewed: but submit a complaint about a dead URL, or a hijacked URL with porn content, and ... the only time you have to wait 24 hours to see something happen, is when dmoz.org is partly down!

There are broken URLs to check and remove, user interfaces to translate into Kurdish or Klingon or whatever, spam to delete, good submittals to get past the spam filter, etc., etc., etc. Some of this activity is logged and credited to an editor's "stats" -- some of it isn't. It doesn't matter much, because we're not looking for people who collect "brownie points" -- we're looking for people who take pride in doing something, anything, that improves the directory.

And third, people who ARE looking to collect brownie points, in order to keep editing without doing anything constructive, have any number of ways to make useless or harmful edits. And it would be a colossal waste of management time and energy to enforce such a brain-dead proposal (and all the evasion techniques it would give rise to).

Non-starter, OK? Now go get some warm clothes on, then go manage your choice of 100 or more volunteers for a year, and finally you may be ready to provide some practical suggestions as a result of your experience.

First of all there are nice normal well-balanced editors, they have one little niche category, that for whatever reason they are interested in. Maybe it has 20 or 30 sites. When a new site gets submitted, they get it edited in a day. They keep the category clean and neat, occassionly add new sites themselves. They do a great job on that category, but thats all they want to do. So maybe in a year they might add 10 sites. Tell that editor to add 5 sites a month, and he's gone.

Then there are editors that become addicted to ODP editing, they don't sleep, they can't stop. Tell that editor to add 5 sites a month and he has no idea what you mean. He's trying to keep his editing down to 50 sites a day.

Or about a category I took over, it had a hundred sites waiting in the "queue". But by the time I was finished, there were less sites than I started with. Why? - half the sites waiting no longer existed, most of the rest had been submitted to the wrong category or were spam. So maybe 10% got added. But after reviewing the exisiting sites, it turned out many of them had gone dead, or also were in the wrong category, so a hundred sites got taken away. How do you deal with that in a quota system? Do I get points for deleting sites?

" if I volunteer, they won't force me to work!"

I think you have the wrong idea of what the term volunteer means.

Just because you "volunteer" does not always mean you can "set your own hours" or work as little or as much as you want. I spent many years volunteering at a hospital, i had strict hours i was to work, very strict guidlines for my conduct while volunteering, and certain ways i had to go about the work i did as a volunteer.

In these days with many people out of work, it is even harder and harder to get volunteer / intern type positions places. Because of this demand for even volunteer positions, organizations can set strict guidlines for the way "volunteers" go about volunteering.

I would love to hear of a organization that has volunteers, but does not require them to act a certain way, work a certain way, abide by certain guidlines, or "volunteer" on a specific schedule.

Setting some guidelines for voluntteers is a practice that reputable organizations have done for many years, and again, it would not hurt the ODP to adopt some of these practices to improve the efficancy of the DMOZ. Of course, this is a "submiters" opinon!!

"that culture would inevitably result in the loss of many volunteers"

Who ever said that other people would not fill some or all of the void? Maybe some people would be willing to join as editors if the ODP has more guidlines to follow. I would certainly not be volunteering someplace where no guidlines were set, and i could do whatever i want whenever i want. I understand that the ODP has a set of standards on paper, but how are they enforced? If someone lists a site, and another editor does not think it belongs, or it violates the ODP guidlines for sites that should be listed, it is just more work for another editor. Some editors actually are working against one another by listing sites, and then someone else having to take time to remove the inappropiate site. I would think that with more "supervision" sites that should not be listed to begin with would not be listed, and thus other editors would not have to waste time "unlisting" the actions of someone else.

<I feel that some of you all want to grab me by the neck right now!!>

It will be interesting to see the path the ODP follows in the coming years.

>>I think the whole issue we are talking about here has moved from beyond a status checking tool to the operating principles of the ODP as a whole.<<

This thread seems to have begun with an assumption that there ~should~ be automated status checking and wanted to discuss how this ~could~ be done. It was a faulty assumption. Yes, submitters think there should be one, but no, editors do not. In order to understand why, we need to discuss ODP principles as a whole.

This has been a great discussion - I'm glad the topic was started.

<adding a brief reply to the above>

ODP does have guidelines for editors and they are enforced. There isn't a minimum rate of editing required (beyond enough to keep the account active) because what is the point? Every edit helps. How does forcing the removal of an editor who adds 5 sites a year help the directory? Yes, we do want more activity from the editors we have, but there are different ways to achieve that - mostly through communication and training (which we do and constantly strive to improve), not by creating arbitrary requirements.

At the risk of opening another can of worms (in the same thread, none the less!)...

Is there a recommended method for notifying Dmoz about URL's that are broken?

Every now and then I stumble on a category that for whatever reason has a large number of useless sites listed. The original site has often been shutdown, and the domain repurchased (possibly for a Google ranking boost) and used the for an entirely different purpose.

An easy way to report these would be nice, but I'm sure that's an entirely separate debate.

This might be better as a separate thread, but Nicky's comment brought up this question of mine.