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.

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.

What’s So Bad About Doing Automated Status Checks?

That is a question I see posted a lot around the net about DMOZ policies. Why not create a system to allow submitters to check the status of their suggestions? Well this question leads to a more important one, What possible benefit could this provide DMOZ, its users and the editors? The answer to the later question is very little.

There is nothing that it would produce that would be beneficial to DMOZ itself. Given the limited resources available, implementing something of that scale would probably (I am not a techie ) not be possible at this point anyway. The limited resources at DMOZ are better directed at more important issues.

The benefit to users is arguable, but dependent on who is defining the users. The ones using the data to find information would have little benefit from this implementation. Those are the users that DMOZ identifies. The only benefit I could see would be in that if they found a useful site they wanted to suggest, they could check to see if it was already waiting or if it needed to be submitted. While this could be useful and a nice addition, its not a necessary one and resources are probably best directed elsewhere IMO.

The benefit to the DMOZ editors would be zero. There is nothing beyond the possible elimination of some the requests for editors to check the status of site suggestions, that the editors would find useful to make their editing more enjoyable, productive, or easier. Since most editors do not respond to feedback or forum requests for status checks, it would be a minuscule benefit at best.

On the other hand, what is so bad about DMOZ providing an automated checking system? Well for starters the limited server capacity would be further drained by adding a system such as this. There are enough technical issues and slow loading times as it is, adding more load on the system would only worsen those issues. Also, the biggest threat to quality of the directory is from spammers. There are some areas of the directory where the vast majority of the suggested sites are not ever going to be listable. Making it easier for a spammer to know how quickly their spam sites are being caught and removed, would in the end make it harder for the editors to find the quality sites available to them. Any features that are potentially more harmful to the quality of the  directory than beneficial, are not likely to be implemented.

<Disclaimer>Note as always, everything posted above is an opinion of just one volunteer. Any official comments or announcements will be found on the Official DMOZ Blog which is administered by AOL staff. <End>