Who is Nan O'Zilla? She is Rob O'Zilla's helpful sister who hangs around the ODP, helping editors clean up the mess that Rob makes.
Dear Nan,

I have an invisible unreviewed in one of my categories. My editor screen shows an unreviewed site but there is nothing there. See: http://dmoz.com/editors/editcat-unrev.cgi?cat=Regional/North_America/United_States/California/Counties/Sonoma. What should I do?

-Confused in California

Dear Confused,

This is a little glitch that you can usually fix yourself. Here are the steps to take.

  • Navigate to the category with the ghost unreviewed and clear out all the non-ghostly unreviewed.
  • Then go to the edit view of the category. The URL for this view begins like this http://dmoz.org/editors/editcat.cgi?cat=Regional...
  • In the location/URL bar for your browser, replace the bolded cgi part of the URL with "clean_ghosts.cgi". The URL should now look like http://dmoz.org/editors/clean_ghosts.cgi?cat=Regional...
  • Go to the new URL with the clean_ghosts.cgi and you should see a zero unreviewed count where the ghost count formerly appeared.
  • If this does not work, post in the Bugs and Features forum. There is usually a thread for ghost unreviewed problems. Staff engineer cptginyu should be able to solve the problem.
If the cutting and pasting becomes too much or you find yourself frequently cleaning up ghosts, you may want to add rpfuller's "Ghostbusters" bookmarklet to your bookmarks. You can find this and many other useful bookmarklets in rpfuller's bookmarks: Bookmarks/R/rpfuller/Bookmarklets and in Tools for Editors.

-Nan

Dear Nan,

I was chatting with one of my co-editors yesterday about creating a new subcategory for Chats. He said we should use "Chats and Forums" because it is a Preferred Term. Not wanting to admit that I didn't know a "Preferred Term" from an "Unpreferred Term" I agreed. What are Preferred Terms?

-Perplexed

Dear Perplexed,

Preferred Terms can be found on the right side of your editing dashboard. The direct link is : http://dmoz.org/preferredterms.html. In a nutshell, Preferred Terms are frequently used names for ODP subcategories. Preferred Terms are not required, but they are highly suggested. Using the same names for subcategories across the directory creates consistency and makes the ODP easier to navigate.

-Nan

Send your questions to me via staff@dmoz.org, be sure to include my name in the subject line.