It gives me a big surprise! how dmoz is still not using captcha to prevent spam submissions? I have observed that DMOZ is the only popular site that doesnt use CAPTCHA when compared to other popular sites like yahoo, myspace, google etc.. Is DMOZ properly looked after? Just curious
That's because DMOZ is no longer important to the web. Google knows that and hasn't updated its version of DMOZ for two years. AOL, DMOZ's owners, knows that too. They haven't spent a cent on improving it in any way shape or form, and when the database crashed, AOL didn't even have a backup, and it took them months to get it going again. Still, it continues to be crippled by various outages and loss of functions, that take quite a while to be fixed. DMOZ isn't important enough to implement CAPTCHAs. Webmasters that are on the ball don't bother with robot-submissions to DMOZ. Besides, there are means to delete this activity quite efficiently. It's all a pointless exercize.
According to some Submissions are not read by the Editors anyway, so it really makes no difference. Most categories are not worth spamming anyway, so it's a waste of time to even try. In the few categories that are worth trying auto-submissions on, then I'm sure they simply just purge the list now and again and never read them.
I don't recall ever seeing captcha on Yahoo's Directory submission form, or are you referring to Yahoo in general?
I'm thinking (s)he means Yahoo (and google) in general, as Google doesn't have a (valid) directory any more, and yahoo uses CAPTCHA in other areas (like their mail)