Wow, I have been pretty much non-existent far too long.  I logged in today and tried to get back up to speed.  I have found concentrating on what I like to do is the best course of action.  My computer time is really limited, and generally I find myself doing other things (fun stuff) instead of editing.  I hope that getting back to my roots will relight the fire that I held so strongly in the past.

One thing that I realized today is that while I am a bit rusty at being an Editor, very  little has changed within the ODP.  I haven’t decided yet if that’s good or bad, but I have an idea.  Judging by a quick visit to Resource Zone, some things are still intermittently broken and the Editors are just as frustrated as everyone else in regards to it.  Guess I really didn’t miss a whole lot.

Sheesh, I have been neglecting this blog.  It’s been over 3 months since I posted and that post was a ‘filler’.  Still don’t have anything important to report, I have edited sporadically here and there and logged in for a whole 3 minutes today to catch up on a few things of interest.  Other than that I have just simply not been around much to be tremendously active.

Summer is now winding down though, school is back in for the kids and it should help open things back up.  I look forward to getting back in the swing of things.

Regards.

Well I’ll be damned if the French haven’t stumbled on the best sporting event on water.  Set your well armed military vessles out and let the idiot pirates come and try to board you.  Good for them!
Really, I still don’t understand why we don’t just have dummy ships floating around out there anyway.  What could be more fun than than a boat full of US Navy Seals sitting on a dummy cargo ship waiting for a couple of motor launches to pull along side and come on board?  Heck these geniuses were duped by a French Frigate that wasn’t even trying to disguise itself.  Plant a few cargo ships around with a few Commando’s on it and after a few more of these goons get nabbed attacking a fully armed military unit and they might just think twice about going after that next juicey cargo ship.

Just my two pennies for the day.    <cmic you know I love ya!>

Tonight I stepped out of character and worked on public suggestions and URL updates.  Just to make it more interesting, I focused in the Adult section.  Hey someone has to do it. 

Just a few observations I made today:

1. Is it really so hard to get somewhat close to the right category?  I a mean come on, I had to move a Spanish Mobile Homes site out of Adult and over to Regional.  <rolls eyes>
2. Why is that 90% of the update requests I looked at today were just poor attempts to keyword stuff their descriptions?  Oh I re-wrote a few of them that needed it, but only one update request was pretty close to being ok.  I almost sent the submitter an email encouraging them to apply.
3. Adult Oriented sites are an interesting breed……

There are a ton of update requests needing processed.  I don’t know why I stumbled into the ones in Adult but that is where my edits lead me tonight, so thats where I went.  I also managed a few minutes over at Resource Zone.  Funny Spam everywhere there too.

Hey did I mention yet that I fell into the world of Twitter?  Well I did, not sure why though.  I seem to be more of a blogger than a tweeter.  I have a couple of  opinions on social networking sites.  My Space appears to be the best tool the FBI every came up with, Facebook is for those of us old guys trying to relieve some of the glory days  and Twitter seems to be a good place for what I imagine to be a lot of lonely people who love to hear themselves talk. 

Yikes, I can see the letters coming in now.  It should be noted however that I am on all three of these occasionally and as I have no followers at all, yet 11 updates in only a couple days being on Twitter I certainly fall under the category of “Must like hearing my self talk”.  The good news is I am following one of those good “Tweeters” so I feel better about having the account.

Tonight felt like old times! I have been here and gone and here again so much lately that getting into a rhythm and working on editing and meta tasks has been tough.

First thing is that I jumped right into my email and feedbacks.  I had quite a few regarding various topics.  Some general questions, some fan mail, some hate mail, you know the usual ODP editor mail bag.    After I had dealt with all of them that needed attention, I managed a tweet about it before heading off to the forums.

I perused the Editor Forums and also those at RZ to see the highlights I have missed over the last few days.  Didn’t appear to have missed a whole lot though.  Many of my feedbacks caught me up on the most important topics of concern.

After I had sufficiently rotted my brain in feedbacks and forums, I rolled the old sleeves up and did some abuse investigations.  I must be a masochist, because I tend to enjoy abuse hunting and investigations.  There are always a comments about whether abuse reports are ever investigated, and the answer is yes they are.  All abuse reports are taken very seriously and the Meta’s that specialize in them.  I don’t claim to be a specialist and I am not even in the ball park with the better abuse hunters, but I enjoy swatting abuse and clearing reports when I can.

To give you an idea of the amount of work that goes into investigating and resolving an abuse report, this might put it into perspective.  I spent about 2 hours working on only a couple of reports.  One doesn’t count, because it was just a duplicate report of another pending and in an area that I don’t work.  I couldn’t do anything more than just close the duplicate report.  The others took up the bulk of my time and were all positively resolved with no abuse found.

The majority of abuse reports that I have worked through generally turn out to be either a lack of interested editors in the area resulting in little or no activity, which is not abuse.  Or simple cases of correcting quality control issues such as parked sites needing removed, redirects, typo corrections, etc.  Again not abuse.

For more information on what is abuse, check out http://report-abuse.dmoz.org/faq .  The FAQ provides a more clear explanation of what constitutes abuse.  While on the subject of Reporting Abuse, quality control issues are not abuse and the Abuse Reporting System should not be used to report quality control issues.  If you see a listing in the directory that needs to be corrected or removed per the Editing Guidelines, use the update a listing link at the top of  the category and suggest the changes that are needed.  Abuse reports require the attention of Meta editors willing to tackle them.  URL updates and quality control issues can be processed by any level of editor with permissions in the category that they reside and likely will be dealt with quicker via the update link than via an abuse report.