OMG!!! Me Too! There are more highly prized and difficult niches to get into than the one I have had admitted. Turns out my niche is pretty easy, and stinky!
Crybaby. I've submitted at least 30 sites in the past couple of years, most of them not mine, and wholly un-connected to mine, but good sites I felt really deserved a listing. 2/~30 listed after 2 years is my record. Not competitive categories at all, not commercial. Most categories are abandoned. The ODP is a ghost town. A report of a quick listing is like a report of a mummy farting. It doesn't mean it's alive.
You won't see those until Google updates its public backlinks information, which happens every few months. Even then Google won't show all your backlinks. Yahoo is much more useful for that.
It is more offensive to be accused of stupidity. The site is non-commercial. It may be worth it to bribe an editor if your site is a crapass MFA with scraped content that gets you $5 a click, but come on, people. Not every site is as useless as yours.
So we have moved from corrupt editor listing there own website to ALL websites which get listed from now on got in by bribing editor? Hopefully Metas won't have too much work in deleting these listings and removing last few editors who actually do any work.
I sympathise with you flagday. Attempting to bribe an editor would be quite staggeringly stupid. As for the people announcing on forums that they would happily do so - good grief! The result of that will be a ban on all their sites. (It has happened.)
What if they are only joking or pushing editor's buttons? Their sites are all banned? Good grief indeed. It would be an issue if DMOZ links had any worth. It's a blessing that they don't anymore.
Have to be. There is no way to distinguish between those who are seriously trying to bribe and those who see the whole thing as a joke. Anyone could claim to be joking, while actually trawling hopefully (if stupidly) for an editor to respond with an offer. I keep trying to warn innocent webmasters of the utter folly of 'joking' about bribing editors. It's madness. Now who is likely to have those statistics? Certainly not me. I would hazard a guess that there are forums seldom or never read by an ODP meta, where a whole flood of silliness on this topic might go unnoticed. This clearly isn't one of them.
It's only madness if DMOZ is manned by a collection of paranoid nutcases. What about innocent until proven guilty? Until you know for a fact that they have done something wrong, you have no business banning their sites. Heck, DMOZ will not remove editors for corruption unless they have a cancelled cheque. If they are looking for an excuse to boot out the vocal ones, then a different standard applies, haha. Personally, I would assume that 100% are joking, because a DMOZ listing is worth so very little.
If someone says "I would be happy to pay $300 for a listing", we have to take the will for the deed. Dmoz has a zero tolerance approach to corruption and that works both ways. Just recently an editor was thrown out for trawling for bribes, as you well know. I don't imagine that the fool actually got paid a cent.
Well, that's about as dumb as it gets, isn't it? It's a lucky thing our courts don't work that way... where would we put everyone found guilty in advance?
Much simpler solution to corruption would be to follow Murphy's words of wisdom: "It's morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money". Simple charge of $50+ for express review (and possible listing) with money going to some charity - everyone is happy – editors chosen for that task will be happy since they'll be doing good deed, suckers will be happy for getting into DMOZ (after few tries to get his MFA site up to guidelines), metas can relax, no more "bribing editor" threads around and very few "when will I get listed in DMOZ" threads which will mostly get limited to good websites and finally poverty in the World will be gone since charities will be getting "millions".