URL Updates and Public Suggestions.

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.

Rolling Up The Sleeves

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.

Where Can I Check The Status Of My Submission?

This is a topic I brushed upon back in October of 2007, but a recent blog comment on this subject begged the question yet again. The question of automatic status checks or a vehicle for submitters to manually check the status of their suggested URL’s is an often asked one.

At present there is no official avenue for someone to check the status of a site suggestion.  In the past the forums at the Resource Zone offered a place where submitters and site owners could ask for a  status of their submissions.  This was a failed experiment for many reasons.  The major problem as I see it, is in what the purpose of the status check would accomplish that would be beneficial?

At the moment there is no official avenue for submitters to check the status submissions.  Frankly I see nothing positive for anyone (except of course the professional spammer) that could come from providing status checks.  You see there really is only a couple of responses that can be returned on a status check:

1. Your site has been rejected. – Sites that don’t meet the criteria or guidelines for inclusion will be discarded/not included.   In the vast majority of cases, sites that fail to be guideline compliant for a listing cannot be made compliant.  As the failed experiment at RZ proved, telling someone that their site isn’t listable rarely has a positive side.   Besides tailoring a site to fit guidelines of one directory or a group of volunteers is foolish, the site presumably is already tailored for its target audience/customers and that is what is important.  One directory listing isn’t nearly as important as serving customer needs.
2. Site is listed. – Umm, that can be determined already by simply looking at the category.  Its a waste of time for editors and/or resources to report back something that anyone can see for themselves.
3. Your site hasn’t been reviewed yet (or has been moved to a more appropriate category for review).  – Means nothing really.  This is of course going to be the most common answer available and given the volunteer nature of the directory there is no way to predict who or when someone will choose to review the suggestion.

The bottom line is, what do you do if the result comes back as 1, 2, or 3?  The answer in all three cases should be exactly the same.  Nothing should change.  Site owners should/must continue to maintain, expand, and promote their sites for the benefit of their customers and visitors.   The site should be for its intended target, not a group of volunteers for the purpose of gaining 1 link.

The long standing advice has always been “suggest and forget”, and while its been said ad nauseum  it really is good advice.  Suggest the site and forget about it.  It’s a much better plan to focus ones resources on what is within one’s own control, and the time and opinions of a third party group of volunteer’s certainly falls outside of ones own control.  DMOZ welcomes site suggestions and most editors are very thankful to have the help of site suggestions in building the directory.  DMOZ does NOT however provide a listing service for websites, and thinking otherwise will only result in frustration.

Shameless plug time :

Oh and by the way, if you are interested in purchasing directory listings (other than in DMOZ) the Best of the Web (BOTW.org) offers some services that might be of interest to you. 

—Disclaimer–

As always, the opinions expressed in this blog and in my articles are my own.  I do not speak for DMOZ, BOTW, or any other organization.  entity or editors.  My opinons come from my own personal experiences,  but certainly do not (nor are they intended too) reflect the opinons of anyone else or any other editors.