Can be days, weeks, months, or years.. or never.

yes me too waiting ...like 4 years back i gave request no luck till now..they say they just pick up links at random and not on first come first serve basis

A real directory focusses on providing information on topics; listing websites is only a means to that end, not a goal in itself.

Now, statistically speaking, "competitive" means nothing more or less than this: surfers are "more likely to" feel adequately served by other websites, and "won't be so likely to" feel the need to search out additional websites to list.

In this respect, directory editors are no different from other surfers--topics that are NOT adequately served by listed sites deserve (and get) the high priorities and most of the attention.

In short, expect an indeterminate wait. For all PRACTICAL purposes, for the website promoter, there is no difference between delay and rejection. I'd assume an unappealable rejection, and take further actions as appropriate. (If that assumption turns out to be wrong, you'll still have done the right thing!)

As for the actual effect of editing priorities on specific sites, "at random" is a reasonable impression of the process. Think of a lottery, where a site review is equivalent to (and about as common as) a two-dollary payout for a one-dollar ticket. Once a website is published, its owner gets a ticket. "First served" is simply not a relevant concept, because we are not serving site suggestions (if anything, they are serving us: and the vast majority of time not even that. Think of them as a pile of tickets submitted for prizes, 90% of them forged and the rest as-yet-undrawn winners.)

Suppose i was to say we have the only site that produces this value to users because of functionality a) b) and c) with associated content.

And suppose there was nothing like it to serve surfers in regions a) b) and c)

And should this be true and if it were definitely uniquely valuable to users, how do i draw this to the attention of an editor to help his analysis be accurate and speed things up?

It seems our sector is slow to update with anything, helping make it easy may be of mutual benefit to editors, surfers and us.

[edited by: Whitey at 11:55 pm (utc) on Oct. 6, 2006]

The site suggestion process is designed to make sure a site is brought to the attention of the editor, at the moment he wants to review just such a site (that is, a site on that particular topic). And that, the suggestion process does very well, extremely efficiently (for the editor and for the suggester.) The weakness is, of course, spam: 90% of all suggestions, and more of the "competitive category" suggestions, are spam, and everyone knows it.

So a suggestion can't, and shouldn't, make one topic a higher priority than any other topic. Because editors know, all too well, from experience, that the "competitively suggested" categories are not the most productive places to work.

And a suggestion can't, and shouldn't, IMPOSE a priority on any particular action within a topic. But a well-written suggestion does have a great influence. By "well-written" I mean "describes what is unique about the site, so even without looking at the site itself, the editor can make an almost perfect guess about what he will end up doing with it." Such "no-brainer" edits tend to get done first, leaving the painful decisions till later. (With good reason: the people who can write an informational description can write an informational website, and, pretty much, vice versa.)

Still, suggestion rejection is by far the most common no-brainer editing action.

Sending to a more appropriate category is probably the second most common no-brainer. You can skip that step, by spending as much time as you need finding the best category match. It shouldn't take more than an hour or two--but it might save months of pointless waiting.