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    rotblitz

    And what are your suggestions for improvements?

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    ykadmin

    If I request a domain to be tag today I don't want to wait years until it becomes applied to a category, the improvement should be that it takes faster to be approved especially for unpopular websites.

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    sjwalter

    What kind of sites are we talking about?  I have in the past helped push through domains faster.  Shoot me an email at opendnsmod at gmail dot com if you want some help.

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    rotblitz

    @support
    "the improvement should be that it takes faster to be approved especially for unpopular websites."

    Ok, that is not concreate enough, I expected real proposals more in detail. Given the domain tagging process (http://community.opendns.com/domaintagging/faq/), what exactly should be changed to speed up the approval process?

    Btw, this is also up to you. You could apply to become a domain tagging moderator...

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    utognazzi

    You can contact the Support Team https://dashboard.opendns.com/support/ -->  "Open a Support Ticket"

    They will approve your tag in one or two days.  

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    ykadmin

    I know about all the ideas and how to escalate getting domains approved but what I am suggesting is a mechanism that automatically gets it done, once a domain is tagged especially if it's tagged with inappropriate categories.

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    rotblitz

    "a mechanism that automatically gets it done, once a domain is tagged especially if it's tagged with inappropriate categories."

    This isn't going to work. A majority of users simply submit any sites they don't like under porn, just to get it blocked... :(
    For many this category is a catch-all for anything they don't like. This is not a joke, but facts, after my experience of 6 years as OpenDNS user.

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    Brian Hartvigsen

    I just want to point out that there are no automatic mechanisms.  Every submission is reviewed by a human once it reaches a certain threshold.  That threshold is determined by the number of votes for/against a particular categorization, the weight of each vote, etc.  Certain categories (such as many of the "adult" categories) have a lower threshold then others.  Once a tag reaches the established thresholds, it is visible to our moderation community for approval.  OpenDNS employees can accelerate this for specific tags/domains.

    We are always looking for ways to do this better and faster, but we don't wont to compromise the data in order to do so.  If you have specific suggestions, please let us by creating an idea for them.

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    cervezafria

    In the meantime whitelist/blacklist ... :)

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    ykadmin

    Brian, I see domains with multiple people taged already since 2008 I agree the quality is important but we need some more quantity I will leave it up to OpenDNS to decide the best strategy as you are the ones who created this great product.

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    Brian Hartvigsen

    If you can give me some examples I'm happy to look into them and see if there are some optimizations that could be recommended to our development team.  Generally speaking, my guess is that they simply haven't reached the thresholds necessary to go to the moderation queue.

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    rotblitz

    Very diplomatic! ;-)

    As I said already, it is up to you (and everybody else) to apply as domain tagging moderator. This is the only really reasonable way to speed up the process. So, if you are unhappy and take content filtering very serious, you now know the way to go. Don't be shy!

    Any automatisms most likely decrease the quality. Only increased human engagement can improve the speed by retaining a high level of quality.

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    rotblitz

    Just to clarify, my last comment was addressed to ykadmin.

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    ykadmin

    rotblitz, not everyone is interested to spend their days tagging domains, me as a business user have to say this is the least thing I am interested in doing, I rather pay more for the product and have OpenDNS get more staff to streamline the process if this is what is needed.

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    rotblitz

    Fair enough.

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    ykadmin

    Brian, here you have one of many examples createspace.com it's a top site it was taged at 2009 and has 25 people voted on the domain and still has not been decided in any categories.

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    ykadmin

    Brian, Another two examples

    news12.com it was tagged from 2009 it has 6 votes
    brooklynpaper.com it was tagged from 2008 it has 16 votes

    As mentioned I do see constantly many of those instances of popular sites with a lot of votes going back years ago and still do not have any categories applied to them.

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    cervezafria

    @ykadmin... To put some perspective in what you are asking... each day over 100,000 new TLDs are registered. What do you think is an appropriate length of time to tag each of those. How many votes should be required to "tag" a site. How do you ensure voting at those levels. What about efficiency? How many OpenDNS users go to "news12" or "brooklynpaper" (6 votes... really?). What tagging priority should those sites receive, in contrast to sites seeing significantly greater OpenDNS traffic/voting. 

    How many OpenDNS employees and volunteers might you think are able to keep pace with that TLD influx (and those numbers don't  count the existing TLDs that change hands daily some of which are repurposed in new ways), and ride herd on the voting process. 

    I'm sure your familiar with 80/20 principles. They apply here as well. If you're concerned about the 20%, you probably need to invoke your own processes to manage those. That's a reason why OpenDNS accounts offer white/blacklisting.  An overlooked tool that every PC user has that can compliment OpenDNS is the HOSTS file.

    Tagging will always be "too slow".

    Food for thought...

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    lekke

    Perhaps an idea that every paying customer gets x domains/year that are processed fast by the opendns moderator team.

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    rotblitz

    Paying customers get more entries for blacklisting/whitelisting domains. Categorization has impact for all, so should not make dependent on paying or not.

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    mpm

    One of the things that slow me down is voting on sites that no longer exist. I go through the list, click on the link and find out the site is parked or not accessible. This usually takes a lot of time. One way to reduce the list to go through is to automatically check whether sites still exist and are reachable, or otherwise remove from the list (and maybe keep on a separate list and check again after a while). That way voters waste less time.

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    rotblitz

    "I go through the list, click on the link and find out the site is parked or not accessible."

    Well, for parked domains simply tag them with or vote up for the "Parked Domains" categoriy which is helpful too.

    And yes, I agree, for domains generally no longer existent in DNS or no longer found via WHOIS an automatic process could run through to remove those.

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    mpm

    Thanks rotblitz, will tag as parked domain in future. But are these reviewed later again once they are in use again (could be for a different type of website)?  Does tagging them as parked remove all (proposed) tags? 

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    rotblitz

    No, "parked domain" does not remove anything else. If the domain is used again, it must be tagged again too, or existing tags to be voted up until they hit the threshold to appear for the tagging moderators to finally approve them.

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    mpm

    Another idea may be to have an option to sort the 'undecided domains' in the 'vote on domain'  list by date. 

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    rotblitz

    "Another idea"

    You are right.  Therefore open a new thread in the Idea Bank section, so that we become able to vote on this idea...

    It's a good idea!  Although you may want to expand on what date you mean, e.g. when the domain was submitted or what.  Also, you may want to name a reason about the advantages this would have for the domain tagging system.

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    mpm

    Thanks rotblitz for the feedback. I have added this as a new idea. (https://support.opendns.com/entries/22264669-Sort-undecided-domains-by-date)

     

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    ykadmin

    I believe those 9 simple steps is a good start.

    1. Every top level domain to have a category
    2. Every domain with more than 7 votes to get a category approved
    3. A domain with already a category to need 15 votes to get a category approved.
    4. Each day the most popular 500 domains with no categories to become catheterized.
    5. Redesign the tagging system to be easier to use.
    6. Have a separate category for sites which cannot be blocked or voted like opendns.com.
    7. Remove all current clotted Moderation sites.
    8. Assign responsible individuals to watch out for each category in Moderation.
    9. Administrators by just voting on a domain to be approved in that category immediately.

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    rotblitz

    "1. Every top level domain to have a category"

    TLD?  E.g. org, com, net, info, biz, mobi, name, ... and all the country TLDs?  Why that?  Or isn't that what you mean by TLD?
    If you do mean this by TLD, you'll be using your always/never block lists.

    "4. Each day the most popular 500 domains with no categories to become catheterized."

    Who will be doing and decide this categorization?

    "6. Have a separate category for sites which cannot be blocked or voted like opendns.com."

    Why this?  You can't do anything with that category anyway.

    "9. Administrators by just voting on a domain to be approved in that category immediately."

    This is there.  You open a support ticket.

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