About Dmoz

Now and then I read comments about Dmoz, the web directory run by volunteer editors. I was an editor from almost the time it began, before it was called Dmoz. Negative comments from people who want to get their site listed are common. You will always find them in any kind of discussion about web directories. Dmoz began as a good idea but it grew faster and farther than the available volunteers.

If the directory submissions could be strictly filtered we would lose some actual good submissions but it might out weigh the good in losing a tonne of complete garbage. If you could look into the submissions in one category second from the top or at the top, like Arts/Weblogs for instance you would find submissions for porn, submissions about monetizing your blog, submissions about travel to India and you might even find weblogs about the arts (dumped in the main category instead of the right subcategories). You would not be likely to find a site you would actually list in Arts/Weblogs. Maybe if you spent a couple of hours going through all the submissions... But you're a volunteer, how much time do you really want to put into Dmoz today. More than that, how long will your patience and interest hold up?

I wrote the below comment in reply to yet another person bad mouthing Dmoz. Even though I quit Dmoz for a few reasons, I still think it has value and I still think the biggest problem is the quantity of junk submissions. There is no way a few volunteers are going to keep up with the volume. No way they would even want to stick with a chore like that. It's not fun. There are so very few decent sites that you come across that it is not even interesting work.

I was a dmoz editor for 8 years. The idea behind it was great but we were soon overwhelmed with garbage. In the end, there are only so many volunteers willing to wade through the trash to find something actually submitted to the right category and not just another splog or ad farm. In the current directory you are fed up in a week, all your beginner enthusiasm is gone. Most new editors quit. It's not like you're getting paid to do that job. I read complaints about dmoz like yours and I'm not impressed. Most often those complaining have the worst sites. Or, they have a decent site until it gets listed and then it changes to become craptastic and full of spam/ ads. Dmoz doesn't have enough volunteers to keep up with the submissions, to fix errors in submissions and to check sites again once they are listed. It's not the system that sucks its the crap that gest submitted that chokes the life out of the directory.