Search: Yet Another Forum

It appears that Yet Another Forum has been started for discussion about ODP (the Open Directory Project – aka Dmoz.org) matters. This one is called Webmaster-Forum.net and is run by an ex-editor (who, I believe, was removed because of abuse or self-promotional reasons).

Already their board has five 5 threads: “dmoz versus yahoo” (which basically asks if you should pay to get into Yahoo or try and get into the ODP – answer: do both!), “dmoz editors test” (where someone asks if there is a test to be an ODP editor: the answer is yes – we do have an application process which people have to pass), “me & kctipton” (where the board administrator ‘John Scott’ states that he is an ex-editor and has a little rant) and “death of the open directory project” (where a member states that ODP will probably die because of bad spelling, grammatical errors, over-listing of sites and omission of sites) and finally “A Solution to the ODP problems” which is actually a good read. However, the solutions proposed aren’t quite workable (as I stated in my post on Resource-Zone).

The main question is: Do we really need yet another board/forum where editors are expected to contribute? We already have the “semi-official” Resource-Zone forum where a large number of editors help out (I help out quite a bit and I’m about the 4th most active poster there: currently with 424 posts to my name) – it’s run by editors, contributed by editors and semi-supported by the ODP staff (i.e. they occasionally read some threads, contribute sometimes but don’t “support” it in any official capacity).

We also have the WebMaster World forum (which I sometimes contribute to), I Help You Services forum and the SearchEngineForums forum (where a number of ODP editors have been banned from contributing – the moderator at the time was, in fact, an ex-editor who was removed from some reason that the mists of time have caused me to forget).

Personally, I tend to help people out via Resource-Zone as more editors “hang out” there, the forums are nicely sorted (even though a few posters have “problems” reading the basic information) and it is nicely moderated: i.e. rants, off-topic posts, non-constructive posts etc – are removed, but anything that is on-topic, non-rant and constructive stays (I was once involved in around a 40 post thread with a submitter and a couple of other editors – but, alas, the submitter resorted to ‘mud flinging’ and ‘name calling’ and hence had their posting privileges revoked). Editors also tend to remember more that at RZ fellow editors are watching more closely (since it’s “semi-official”) and, hence, if they foul up and resort to the mud-flinging antics of others then it could even resort to their ODP editing privileges being revoked.

Oh – I don’t appreciate it when people contact me directly via ICQ, Yahoo, MSN or Yahoo asking for ‘Site Submission Status’ (or via email to my website) – go to Resource-Zone and ask THERE (as it is it’s whole “purpose of being”): if you still feel the need to contact me directly, then do so via me editor profile. Coming to my website(s) and sending me feedback via that method WILL BE IGNORED. Why? Because my ODP mail (i.e. email sent via the ODP editor feedback method) is sorted into a specific mail folder on my system – and if any ODP mail comes to another address, then it may either flag up my anti-spam system (hence be bounced back to the sender) or I could just delete it as standard ‘rubbish mail’. However, email from the ODP will sit and be filtered safely into another folder for me to reply to when I get a chance – but if they question should have been asked at Resource-Zone, then I just point the person there…