I would be interested to know any basic editorial guidelines which could help in a submission, eg. Contact details: Is an email contact sufficient or is more than one contact method required? Ads: What is the policy for approving/rejecting sites with ads. I understand this is probably all subjective to the editor, but any general guidelines would be appreciated. TIA DMOZ editors.
Pretty much an editor discretion call unless theyve changed it since i left. The general thought process is "Is this site an ad with a little content tossed in to justify it or a site with content that contains some ads". Best analogy I know is a comparison to TV. It's nice to watch cable where I dont see ads, but I'll still watch network TV where there are 5 minute stretches of commercials if the show is worth watching. The minute an infomercial comes on I change the channel. Place I ran into a lot of problem with it was in History cats where a non-unique cut-n-paste article was posted simply as am advertising platform. Those didnt offer content not already present in the cat and got the boot. The mere presence of advertising shouldn't be an issue though. Many excellent sites have ads on them.
Rob is correct (of course ) The guidelines for submitters as well as the guidelines for editors are both public. You can check them out on the DMOZ main site, just click around a bit... Rummage around DMOZ, see all the sites with ads on them. You'll see that it really makes little difference, unless of course it's an affiliate site, which the ODP seems to frown upon, unless of course the affiliate is another DMOZ editor or in the adult section, but then there may be a connection there.
be sure to read http://www.dmoz.org/add.html and http://www.dmoz.org/help/submit.html and maybe http://blog.dmoz.org/tag/Submissions/