DMOZ Editor

[Elite Skills]

Accepted! After a few tries I finally was accepted into being a dmoz editor.

Many of the submissions there were 2-3 years old without being reviewed. There is not and automatic denial email or an option for one. Editors are given the submitters emails making any new person applying with false credible looking information able to get a targetted section's reliable feed of emails to spam. Since there are hundreds of sites on queue it makes it horribly inconvenient to have to send rejection emails to all of them and face spamming or general harassment. It's terrible. I enjoy editing the category but it still has some work to be done, even at a new editor's first glance. For protection reasons I won't give out my category. I don't want to lose the position.

Any questions about how things are handled?

[fathom]

Excellent Elite Skills -- congradulations!

I am a big fan of DMOZ and the cause. It is alot of work but just like here it can be quite rewarding.

Particularly when seeing "the other side"! :-)

[donaldb]

Any questions about how things are handled?

Be careful. You can offer advice to submitters, but remember that now that you are an editor you have to abide by the ODP Communication Guidelines.

[vintagedge]

I have a question.

I originally submitted my site to DMOZ last June with no results.
I submitted again (I know now that I shouldn't have) in September, again with no results.
At the suggestion of some on this forum I e-mailed the editor with a question as to if I had submitted incorrectly or to the wrong category or what. That was in January. I have had no response (or listing)
So my question is - do I just wait and hope?

Karen
www.vintagedge.com

[cbp]

Head over to www.resource-zone.com and ask there status of suggestion. Read the guidelines first.

Also see this thread:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=12039

CBP

[Elite Skills]

Thanks fathom and donaldb =).

I won't say anything abusive or give anyone an unfair advantage.

Guidelines

"From time to time, users and editors may contact other editors through avenues outside of the editor feedback function. This is a function of the Directory's public nature."

Vintagedge- It's at the editors convenience and discretion to add your site. I'm in a relatively small category but I had hundreds of submissions to it. The past editors could not keep up and as a result there were sites backlogged since 2001. If you submit to a larger category such as online t-shirt sales your site will be stuck there for awhile. In large categories sites are subject to more critical quality checks. You may even try to apply to edit a smaller category and work your way towards a submission if you see the category needs help but you have to provide equal opportunity to all submissions if accepted. If you do contact an editor make sure you give full details of the submission and why the site should be considered as a quality resource to DMOZ. If you don't recieve a reply in awhile try asking someone in the larger related categories to help. Make sure you pay careful attentions to the guidelines before any dmoz submissions. Lazy descriptions and titles that need editing make it harder for us to click the "update"(add) the site button.

[vintagedge]

Thanks for the info! I'll try those things.
Karen

[dssquirt]

I have several sites I have submitted to DMOZ. They show up if you go to the specific category, so they are listed in DMOZ. However, if you just do a search on DMOZ it comes up that the site is not out there.

So - I don't understand this search engine. Why aren't the sites showing up when you just search for them?

I like the idea of DMOZ and having an actual human editor; however, it appears to be failing badly.

[Elite Skills]

It's not a search engine. DMOZ.org has different results than DMOZ.com. How often they update their servers with the new data is up to them. After being accepted into one of the categories the search results page does not automatically update with the new data. -Same with deleted sites; the data still shows up. DMOZ just relies on the people's kindness to edit. It may be a bit of a cynnical viewpoint but I think the system works fine -just people in general just want to take and not give back. Because of the massive scale of links it provides to sites like alexa or php includes of the directory, it's not good to have it constantly changing and moving the links around. It's best just to keep consistently updating over a set interval to ensure quality.

[cbp]

So - I don't understand this search engine. Why aren't the sites showing up when you just search for them?

Its because DMOZ is a Directory and NOT a search engine.

If you search at DMOZ, the only sites that show up is those sites that have the words you are looking for in the title of the site used by DMOZ and description used by DMOZ (it does not matter what on the site) .... DMOZ categorizes sites, it does not search them like a search engine (after all, thats what Google et al is for).

Think of the search function at DMOZ more to be used for searching for the category related to the words you type in - then browse the category for sites.

CBP