URL Notes
by totalxsive

URL notes. Those little coloured things that make your editing screens more spangly. But what are they actually there for, and who put them there? This newsletter article will hopefully shed a little more light upon them.

There are three types of note:

Red Notes

These generally point out sites that should *not* be listed (though there are exceptions). Examples of such sites:

  1. Spam -- multiple inappropriate submissions of a particular URL to various different categories.
  2. Redirects -- a page that redirects the user to another URL. For example, if you visited http://www.foo-redirect.com/ , you would end up at http://www.foo.com/ . You should list http://www.foo.com/ in this case.
  3. Mirrors -- a site that is an exact copy of another site. For example http://www.foo.com/ and http://www.bar.com/ might be exactly the same, in which case we would only list one of these, so one would carry a red note.
  4. Affiliate Sites -- we do not list sites that act as affiliates to other sites. For example, some sites consist purely of links to Amazon.com, where the webmaster makes some money on every referral. Since the information is already available at Amazon.com, there is no need to include this site (unless it has something unique to offer, such as reviews or other information.)
  5. Affiliate-tagged Sites -- sometimes people will submit sites with an affiliate ID included, such as http://www.foo.com/?affiliateid=bar&number=12345 . This is so that the submitter can make money when the user clicks the link. In this case, foo.com may have a tag warning editors to remove the affiliate tag.
  6. Illegal sites -- sites offering warez, child pornography or other content that we do not list.

Yellow Notes

These are 'information' or 'advisory' notes. They inform editors of special circumstances - a good example is Geocities, where pages stop working temporarily if they receive too much traffic. Other examples are where a site has been submitted agressively (though perhaps not to the extent that it needs an red note) or where a site that is suitable for deeplinking may have mirrors (such as http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

Green Notes

These are 'good' notes, and are put on sites that editors are encouraged to deeplink. These offer exceptionally useful content often not available elsewhere. Examples are http://www.bbc.co.uk/ , http://www.imdb.com/ and http://www.rollingstone.com/ . If a green-noted site is submitted, then in general you should list it, if you feel it is appropriate for the category (though you may of course modify the title and description if it does not meet the guidelines.)

What about Purple Notes?
There are a few purple notes around -- these have the same meaning as yellow notes, and have been depreciated in favour of yellow notes, so you shouldn't see many of these around. You may also see transparent notes -- these are accidents, and you should let someone know about them.
Who can post notes?
Only editalls, keditalls, metas, kmetas, catmods and staff (root) editors can post URL notes -- category editors and cateditalls cannot post them.
How can I request for a note to be added?
You can send editor feedback to an editor with the relevant permissions (see http://dmoz.org/edoc/editall.html for a list of editors capable of note-posting) to do it for you, or post in the 'URL Note Requests' thread, currently located at http://dmoz.org/forum/threaddisplay.cgi?t=Forum24/HTML/000752.html. You will need to provide the URL that you think needs a note and the reason why. You can also forward the listing to the category Test/See_Editor_Notes
Can notes be changed or removed?
If circumstances have changed and the note provided on an URL is no longer relevant, then any editor who can post notes may change the content of the note, or remove it altogether.
Do notes apply to deeplinks and subdomains?
Yes and no respectively. If http://www.foo.com/ was red-noted, then http://www.foo.com/bar/ , http://www.foo.com/footoo/ and http://www.foo.com/index.html would all have the same note. However http://bar.foo.com/ and http://bar.foo.com/blarg/ would not; this would have to be noted separately.
Are the notes logged?
Yes, there is a logging system in place, however only those editors capable of adding notes are able to view the note log.
If I delete a site with a note, will the note still be there?
Yes. Notes are stored in a separate database to site listings. Indeed, sometimes red notes are added to domains before they are picked up by an editor - for example we may find that http://www.foo.com/ has several mirrors and so these will be tagged as soon as they are found, instead of waiting for someone to find them. Prevention is better than cure.
I don't like the coloured edit buttons that come with notes. Can I make them all blue again?
Yes, to do so click on the 'Change Profile' option on your Editor Dashboard and tick "Disable the color coded edit buttons for URL notes". The notes will still show up when you edit the affected listings, however.

Further reading:

The official document covering URL notes is available at http://dmoz.org/urlnote.html, which goes over the main points given here.

- totalxsive

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