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.

DMOZ – Happenings

Well kind of a misleading post title.  I have been mostly away for the better part of a week.  Real life is kicking me in the [edited] backside right now.  Between family and real work, not much time to accomplish much of anything else, including posting to this blog.  I have manged a little over 400 total edits in May, but most of those came on one day.

The last 10 days I have only managed time for around a dozen, and most of those were in a mentoring capacity of editors needing assistance/training.  There is a lot of this and that going around, but my lack of activity is not due to lack of motivation.  Low motivation and morale is a constant lately, but while it sometimes makes the deciding factor of whether to edit today, it hasn’t been the biggest issue with my limited activity this month.

To do list:

1. Finish my Indiana Localities cleanup operation.  – This is my biggest priority, when time permits.  As it stands I am still sitting somewhere in the I’s I think.
2. Work on any straggling new applications in areas that I am most interested in.  We need more new editors always.  I have been trying to watch out for good applications, but more needs to be done.
3. Planning a strategy for a localized recruiting effort.  I have been brainstorming the best ways to motivate potential local Indiana editors into applying to edit.  Haven’t figured out what would be best yet, but thats a goal I have to work on.
4. Continue to work with new editors and even some of the more seasoned ones that I have joined, so that they can continue to grow as editors and improve.

Hopefully some more time permits me to work on some of these soon.

Myth: DMOZ Backlog

The definition of “backlog” is :

An accumulation of jobs not done or materials not processed that are yet to be dealt with”

It is a myth that DMOZ has a backlog of submitted sites. The reason this is a myth, is that the sites that are submitted via the public interface are not guaranteed inclusion. In fact, they are nothing more than suggestions for the editors to use if they choose to, for the purpose of building the directory. There is no backlog, only a surplus of resources available to editors for their use in building the directory. Nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t know where this myth started, nor the reasons behind it. I can say in all honesty though, that in some categories public suggestions are a complete waste of time and a poor resource for the category. In other cases, they are an invaluable resource for the category. It depends solely on the category in question, the quality of the suggestions, and the editors choosing to edit there. For me, when editing in a small Regional locality for example, the public suggestions can be very helpful and save a lot of time searching in most sub-categories. The exception to that is Real Estate and Automotive categories. I find the vast majority of publicly submitted sites to these regional sub-cats are very poor resources and usually won’t look at them. On the flip-side of things, in certain topical categories for example, I will rarely if ever look in the public suggestion pools for possible inclusions. Its far more productive to search out sites on my own than to wade through the muck in the spam ridden unreviewed pools there.

There is no guideline that requires an editor to ever enter the unreviewed pool. I can tell you from experience though, that the suggestions are sometimes very beneficial and an editor usually gets a feel for which areas are better than others as their own experience grows. There are literally dozens of different resources available for building the directory, from site suggestions and personal searches, to bill boards, phone books, and bumper stickers. There is room for all of these resources and they are all welcomed help to the editors trying to build categories. Lets just not think of one of them as a backlog, simply because there is a large quantity to choose from.

[Off Topic] They just reported another after shock this morning, didn’t feel this one but they said its the largest one yet.[/off topic]