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I got fed up of waiting for my submission, so one summer I hung around on their forums for a while asking questions and pretending like I was really interested in the concept of a hand-picked directory. Then I was able to join as an editor, promising to add dozens of language schools in my geographical area that weren't listed.
Take it from me, inside DMOZ it is a joke. The editors don't even bother to contact you to tell you that they've just deleted your submission, even though there is a feedback system built into the deletion process.
The worst thing is that people take over categories and then don't log-in for months. And whilst they're not there, you can't transfer sites that were misplaced in your category. Neither can you request sites that should really be in yours. You have to go so high up the branch that the person who gets your requests doesn't know anything about your category, and is getting dozens of such requests anyway, and so just ignores them.
Also, 80% of the time everyone's just arguing and bickering about the ideology and principles of the thing, and about what should go where. There is a lot of internal power struggle and ego. There is a ton of red tape in order to do anything.
On top of that, the ideology is that a site has to have great CONTENT. It doesn't matter if the site is never updated, or that the site is something out of the 1980's. If it has content on it that is relevant to the category, it will get in. Whereas if you are trying to get your business listed, but you only have information about your business on your site, then you won't.
Taking my category as an example, if someone was looking for language schools to go to, and wanted to find out information about particular ones (like opening times, prices, and downloadable brochure, etc), they'd be out of luck - submissions like that would have been discarded.
Whereas if you had a crappy 1980's site with loads of crappy info about language learning and techniques that hadn't been updated for years, well that would be in there because of the content.
Anyway, the whole fuss about DMOZ a few years ago was that some people figured out that google used a site's presence in DMOZ in its algorithm, so all these SEOers and spammers infiltrated DMOZ and posted crappy sites that weren't supposed to be there. As soon as it started to distort the SERP, google changed their algorithm and DMOZ became much less important.
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