Dec 8th 2009 11:48AM
2009 Year in Review: Editor & Community Achievements
Directory & Community Development
Greenbust Effort & the Purple Push
makrhod headed up two projects to process long-standing edits. During the first, she encouraged editors to process greenbusts that had accumulated over time. The result was that greenbust edits were completely cleared for all directory branches except for World, and even there the number was considerably diminished.
In the Purple Push, makrhod again organized editors to process all update requests. This effort was completely successful. Thanks to the efforts of many editors, the directory was declared completely update-free (for a little while, anyway).
Both of these were incredible achievements and representative of the amazing collaborative efforts of our editors. Thanks to everyone who helped with these initiatives!
"Foodbusters" Initiative
The Shopping/Food editors held a week-long "Foodbusters" challenge to process the unreviewed sites in this area of the directory. This resulted in 211 new listings in this area.
Typo Fixes
Between March and July, bluestar fixed over 38,000 typos in titles, descriptions, category descriptions and submission notices across Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, News, Recreation, Reference, Science, Society, Sports and parts of Regional.
Geocities Updates
Geocities closed down in November rendering thousands of listings obsolete. Beginning on the day of Yahoo's announcement in April and continuing throughout the months leading up to the closure, editors worked tirelessly to find replacement sites (where possible) and remove any outdated listings.
Addition of Current Events Categories
This year, editors dedicated a great deal of time to updating existing categories and developing new categories to cover timely events. Examples include:
Editor School
A new class entered Editor School this year. This mentorship program pairs newer editors with more experienced mentors to help mentees gain additional knowledge and experience in editing.
Official DMOZ Blog
Keeping this blog running throughout the year is a collaborative effort between the editor community and AOL Staff. Editors help with all aspects of the blog including editorial calendar development, writing and editing posts and responding to common questions and concerns from our readers. artisands, hiraeth, glippitt, lisagirl, mollybdenum, imrankhan, crowbar, jensarentoft, laigh, and stevek have each contributed at least one post in 2009; and chaos127, johndouglas, laigh, mollybdenum and photofox have kept everything running smoothly.
International Growth & Development
Expansion in World/Thai
Thai editors, under the leadership of vorapon, have done a phenomenal job of building out the Thai language categories. In 2009, the number of listings has doubled from 2000 to 4000.
Creation of World/Sinhala
This year, editors under the leadership of sirisusara created a new category for sites in the Sri Lankan Sinhala language.
World/Punjabi_Gurmukhi Script Changes
Editor hswaseer has been busy converting the titles and descriptions from transliterated Punjabi into Gurmukhi script.
Expansion of United Kingdom Regional Categories
Editors in the UK regional categories made tremendous progress this year. The England category topped the 125,000 listing mark; Scotland increased by 30%; and the Isle of Wight increased from 600 sites and 30 locations to 1800 sites and 60 locations.
Expansion of World/Russian
The World/Russian branch increased by approximately 9000 sites. Editors in this area performed over 80 topical reorganizations and created a Russian sub-forum in Resource Zone (link). An additional 250 editors joined this branch; additionally, two Russian editors were granted meta privileges and an additional two were granted top-level privileges in World/Russian. In 2009, there were 25 posts and 3200 comments on the unofficial Russian DMOZ Blog (in Russian).
Personal Milestones & Achievements
New Editor Achievements
wszp joined the project this summer and has to date made 708 edits including 273 unique adds.
Use of DMOZ RDF Data to Improve Directory Search
Over the summer, tanstaaf1 created a site to improve DMOZ usage and promotion of the World/Russian and World/Ukrainian branches through improved search functionality. The site is built on the RDF data and provides better results than the built-in ODP search because of an improved ability to handle Russian and Ukrainian morphology (inflections, word forms). For each category displayed in the search results, the user may view listings and (based on permissions) edit that category or suggest & update site listings.
You can give this a try in English & in Russian with these sample categories:
In Memoriam
Sadly, we lost two of our long-time editors in recent months. Both ianillo and brmehlman made countless contributions to the directory and to the DMOZ community overall during their many years of volunteer service. They will be greatly missed.
Greenbust Effort & the Purple Push
makrhod headed up two projects to process long-standing edits. During the first, she encouraged editors to process greenbusts that had accumulated over time. The result was that greenbust edits were completely cleared for all directory branches except for World, and even there the number was considerably diminished.
In the Purple Push, makrhod again organized editors to process all update requests. This effort was completely successful. Thanks to the efforts of many editors, the directory was declared completely update-free (for a little while, anyway).
Both of these were incredible achievements and representative of the amazing collaborative efforts of our editors. Thanks to everyone who helped with these initiatives!
"Foodbusters" Initiative
The Shopping/Food editors held a week-long "Foodbusters" challenge to process the unreviewed sites in this area of the directory. This resulted in 211 new listings in this area.
Typo Fixes
Between March and July, bluestar fixed over 38,000 typos in titles, descriptions, category descriptions and submission notices across Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, News, Recreation, Reference, Science, Society, Sports and parts of Regional.
Geocities Updates
Geocities closed down in November rendering thousands of listings obsolete. Beginning on the day of Yahoo's announcement in April and continuing throughout the months leading up to the closure, editors worked tirelessly to find replacement sites (where possible) and remove any outdated listings.
Addition of Current Events Categories
This year, editors dedicated a great deal of time to updating existing categories and developing new categories to cover timely events. Examples include:
- Influenza
- A-H1N1/"Swine Flu"
- Healthcare Reform
- President Obama
- 2010 Winter Olympics
- Copenhagen Climate Change Conference
Editor School
A new class entered Editor School this year. This mentorship program pairs newer editors with more experienced mentors to help mentees gain additional knowledge and experience in editing.
Official DMOZ Blog
Keeping this blog running throughout the year is a collaborative effort between the editor community and AOL Staff. Editors help with all aspects of the blog including editorial calendar development, writing and editing posts and responding to common questions and concerns from our readers. artisands, hiraeth, glippitt, lisagirl, mollybdenum, imrankhan, crowbar, jensarentoft, laigh, and stevek have each contributed at least one post in 2009; and chaos127, johndouglas, laigh, mollybdenum and photofox have kept everything running smoothly.
International Growth & Development
Expansion in World/Thai
Thai editors, under the leadership of vorapon, have done a phenomenal job of building out the Thai language categories. In 2009, the number of listings has doubled from 2000 to 4000.
Creation of World/Sinhala
This year, editors under the leadership of sirisusara created a new category for sites in the Sri Lankan Sinhala language.
World/Punjabi_Gurmukhi Script Changes
Editor hswaseer has been busy converting the titles and descriptions from transliterated Punjabi into Gurmukhi script.
Expansion of United Kingdom Regional Categories
Editors in the UK regional categories made tremendous progress this year. The England category topped the 125,000 listing mark; Scotland increased by 30%; and the Isle of Wight increased from 600 sites and 30 locations to 1800 sites and 60 locations.
Expansion of World/Russian
The World/Russian branch increased by approximately 9000 sites. Editors in this area performed over 80 topical reorganizations and created a Russian sub-forum in Resource Zone (link). An additional 250 editors joined this branch; additionally, two Russian editors were granted meta privileges and an additional two were granted top-level privileges in World/Russian. In 2009, there were 25 posts and 3200 comments on the unofficial Russian DMOZ Blog (in Russian).
Personal Milestones & Achievements
New Editor Achievements
wszp joined the project this summer and has to date made 708 edits including 273 unique adds.
Use of DMOZ RDF Data to Improve Directory Search
Over the summer, tanstaaf1 created a site to improve DMOZ usage and promotion of the World/Russian and World/Ukrainian branches through improved search functionality. The site is built on the RDF data and provides better results than the built-in ODP search because of an improved ability to handle Russian and Ukrainian morphology (inflections, word forms). For each category displayed in the search results, the user may view listings and (based on permissions) edit that category or suggest & update site listings.
You can give this a try in English & in Russian with these sample categories:
- Moscow, in English (the capital of Russia)
- Kyiv, in English (the capital of Ukraine)
- Петербург, in Russian (that's Saint Petersburg, the second largest city of Russia)
- Київ, in Ukrainian (that's Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine)
- Харьков, in Russian (that's Kharkiv, the second largest city of Ukraine)
In Memoriam
Sadly, we lost two of our long-time editors in recent months. Both ianillo and brmehlman made countless contributions to the directory and to the DMOZ community overall during their many years of volunteer service. They will be greatly missed.
1. This is not the right place for this message, but I couldn't find any other way to get in touch.
I applied to become an editor(reg key f702f034355920acedda78e57b4f66b2), received a confirmation email that asked me to reply to it.
I replied, but the email bounced.
550 5.7.1 apply@dmoz.org... Relaying denied
550 5.1.1 apply@dmoz.org... User unknown
503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)
What do I do now?
Posted at 5:57AM on Dec 16th 2009 by Vivek
2. You're right, this isn't the right place to ask such a question. This is a known issue, and the only solution is to keep trying until the message is accepted. For further details see http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54437
Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 18th 2009 by chaos127
3. Dear Chaos127
As taking advantage the Vivek question, I also request please reduce the time of approval of website on Dmoz directory. And if a site is rejected then mail back to the submitter, what are the errors. Thanks please never mind.
Posted at 10:47AM on Dec 19th 2009 by humza
4. I have a Huge site which is Never Reviewed. I have tried everywhere "Resource Zone ect". All e-mail contacts for ODP bounce back as to edit. aplications.
My sits is a nude celebrities. This site has many times! the content of all your other nude celebs sites combined.
I spent many many hours going through your nude celeb sites several months ago and reported many of them which were "reported attack sites", dead or Exact Duplicated. You did remove all of what I reported - what's left any reasonable person would consider trash but I guess your quality standards are not for me to decide.
Can somebody please look at my site
Posted at 1:14PM on Dec 29th 2009 by gangwarco.com
5. @gangwarco.com - Thank you for taking the time to help improve the quality of listings in the directory.
As for your suggestion, the standard answer is that we are not a listing service, the editors volunteer their time to edit in areas that they believe will improve the directory.
In your case, I can hazard a guess as to why your site may take some time to be reviewed. That category is probably one of the spam-magnets attracting hundreds of suggestions which are 'trash'. In amongst those are the better sites but it will take an editor many days of work to identify them.
Like many a dedicated editor, I might reluctantly spend a week or so looking at nude celebrities purely for the good of the directory, unfortunately my wife wouldn't quite understand.
regards
regards
Posted at 8:45AM on Dec 30th 2009 by Eric-the-Bun
6. Great updates,, still trying to get mny site submitted
Posted at 9:48PM on Dec 30th 2009 by John Paul Aguiar
7. As for your suggestion, the standard answer is that we are not a listing service, the editors volunteer their time to edit in areas that they believe will improve the directory.
In your case, I can hazard a guess as to why your site may take some time to be reviewed. That category is probably one of the spam-magnets attracting hundreds of suggestions which are 'trash'. In amongst those are the better sites but it will take an editor many days of work to identify them.
Posted at 9:34AM on Jan 2nd 2010 by 8thnike
8. Deepest sympathies to the families of ianillo and drmehlman.
And congrats to England for topping an eigth of a million.
Posted at 11:47AM on Jan 3rd 2010 by Will
9. Ive read the policies and instructions to submitting to dmoz, however i still dont understand the main criteria to be accepted into the directory. Are my sites suitable?
Posted at 5:55AM on Jan 7th 2010 by Finance
10. @Finance - to tell you whether you sites are listable would require a review which we are not going to do.
However I will make a general point - the more content a site has the more likely it is to be listable. By spreading your information over 3 sites, each site is less likely to be listable than had you created 1 site with all that information in it. I have come across situations where a webmaster has spread their content over so many sites that none of them were listable at all.
There may be good reasons for doing so (SERPS, business reasons) but, remember, we are not interested in any of that, only in building a good directory.
If you have multiple sites, one suggestion is to make a single top-level site which links to all the others (i.e. an index to all your offerings) and to suggest that - this gives you one suggestion with the best chance of being accepted on the content criteria.
Note our criteria is that one entity has 1 website whether it is spread over one or more domains (=> single suggestion to the best category). An editor inspects it and can then suggest deeplinks to other categories.
regards
Posted at 6:36AM on Jan 7th 2010 by Eric-the-Bun
11. I read with interest that you hve introduced the "Foodbusters" Initiative, and that the Shopping/Food editors held a week-long "Foodbusters" challenge to process the unreviewed sites in this area of the directory.
What about my site?(cake Decorating supplies shop) submitted over two years ago!
I gave up trying to submit based on the content of the site, and tried instead to be listed as a business in my town. No Joy - No Listing - waste of time. What is incredibly frustrating is that a friends brand new home dog grooming business has received a dmoz listing and they didn't even know about it, and don't employ anyone to to do any seo for them.
I have applied to be an editor, I would love to look after the category either for my town or the industry I work in and know well - but I get rejected for having an interest in it - so you have to have no interest in the area you want to edit to become an editor? Hmmmm............
Posted at 12:56PM on Jan 7th 2010 by Donna Taylor
12. I totally understand that patience is key when submitting to a site run by volunteers, but I submitted Gardenology.org 5 months ago and still nothing. The site is about 17,000 pages in size, and quite solid, so I would have hoped it would have gotten inclusion in the gardening category by now. When you submit, the message only says it can take "over 2 weeks".
Perhaps a new system would help, where people can vote on submissions, or something like that, so everything doesn't depend on a few overburdened editors?
Posted at 9:21AM on Jan 8th 2010 by Raffi
13. @Donna Taylor
I'm afraid that is the luck of the draw. Your friend's site was probably found by an editor whilst they were building up a category. Last evening I added 25 sites to an area of which only 6 sites had been suggested. It can take years for some categories to be visited and updated, a matter of months for others.
@Raffi
Voting systems are taken over by the 'seo' communities - there are already forums for the exchange of diggs, stumbles etc. The net result would be that the sites we want to list would get few votes, whereas the sites we want to keep out (i.e. made for advertising) would get block votes in the thousands.
regards
Posted at 1:41PM on Jan 8th 2010 by Eric-the-Bun
14. @Donna Taylor
PS We are happy to accept editors who are affiliated with websites, and, in fact, most of our editors have some affiliations. However we ask applicants to show that they are actually interested in the directory, not just in listing their own site.
The rejection email will have given a list of reasons for rejection, one or more of which will have applied and you may or may not have had extra comments. No one is ever rejected for a category merely because they have a site that could be listed their.
regards
Posted at 1:50PM on Jan 8th 2010 by Eric-the-Bun
15. Can you tell me how to do? I have to apply when the editors received responses are
¡°*** ATTENTION ***
Your e-mail is being returned to you because there was a problem with its
delivery. The address which was undeliverable is listed in the section
labeled: "----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----".
The reason your mail is being returned to you is listed in the section
labeled: "----- Transcript of Session Follows -----".
The line beginning with " DATA
Posted at 6:57PM on Jan 9th 2010 by liutian1937
16. Thanks
Posted at 6:58PM on Jan 9th 2010 by liutian1937
17. @liutian1937
This is a known issue, and the only solution is to keep trying until the message is accepted. For further details see http://www.resource-zone.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54437
Posted at 6:34AM on Jan 10th 2010 by Eric-the-Bun
18. Dmoz is getting much better, there are number of editors being approved almost every day and getting in dmoz is much easier than ever before as far as the quality websites are concerned, since the editors are volunteers and they have good things to do in life just like us and aim to earn, spend time with their family, friends, colleagues and loved ones, you guys should ask your questions in the right place than just complaining here.
Let%uFFFDs say, our own site which gets tons of traffic, business and so on has never been accepted in Dmoz in last two years or even more, which is equipped with loads of informative and helpful content for users and we understand, it%uFFFDs just because there are no editors for the categories we submit our site to (i.e. our country categories), no spam and both on-site and off-site seo, quality back links and even great inbound and outbound linking strategies, higher Google page rank, and even Alexa page rank, but does it make any difference? To be frank, it does not make any difference as far as we keep getting business from world of mouth, news, TV, Radio, Web, and so many other resources there.
Anyway, belated Merry new year to all Editors, readers and its sad to hear about Both Ianillo and Brmehlman, you guys should be missed in Dmoz
All the best with 2010, May good lord brings you happiness, joy, peace, and less spam :)
Regards / Tina
Posted at 11:42AM on Jan 11th 2010 by Tina
19. Hi,
First off, Happy New Year!!! May 2010 be better than 09, let's be healthy and prosperous.
Just a quick query, if you don't mind: I just recently found my site listed in DMOZ ( thank You, by the way, am honored) , but listed under a "bookmark" and wanted to know the difference between being listed as a regular resource website and a "bookmark".
Your reply would be highly appreciated.
Posted at 1:49PM on Jan 14th 2010 by fel3232, youtube addict
20. @fel3232, youtube addict
Every editor has a bookmark category in which they can put sites which reflects their interests (much like bookmarks/favourites in a browser).
It can also be used to build up categories to demonstrate their editing skills when applying for new permissions (i.e. when applying for a new category, they can point to example listings they would put in the category they are applying for).
Sometimes they build up example categories in the area which, following a review, can then be transferred to the main directory.
Unless you can see it in a context like that, I'd assume that they came across the site when surfing, were taken with it and added it to their bookmarks so they could access it whenever they wanted to.
regards
Posted at 7:44AM on Jan 16th 2010 by Eric-the-Bun