Editable Search[4] Multiple URLs Editing Instructions

1. Log into Open Directory as an editor.

2. Type in the search term.
   Generally you want to type in a misspelling here, or a bad URL that's in many places in the directory. For all the other boxes, see Search[4] Options.

3. Make the edits you want to be made to all the links in the middle frame boxes provided.
   If you don't select the 'Move to new category' radio button, the 'New category:' field will be ignored. Use the / separated format, as given in the example left in the box for you. The other fields are as in the standard edit page - if you are not 100% familiar with them, you probably don't want to be using this tool, it's dangerous I tell you! If you want different things to happen to different links, again, you will get another chance to pick and choose later, but this makes it more convenient if you want the same edits to happen to most or all of the links on your page. Remember that most links deserve individual review .

4. Review the parsed URLs in the middle frame.
   This is where you select which URLs you don't want to modify after all (uncheck the checkbox before the URL), and make any special tweaks to individual URLs. Again, these fields are as on the standard form, and if you don't recognize them, you are probably not experienced enough to be using this tool. Yes, you can change the descriptions on some URLs, move some to unreviewed, some others to a new category, and delete the rest. Be careful, again, this is a chainsaw-like power tool, and there isn't an easy way to undelete the forty-eight sites you decide you didn't want to delete after all. Even though staff claims there is a rollback mechanism somewhere, I haven't seen it! Check the list. Check it twice.

5. Hit the "Submit!" button at the bottom of the middle frame to make the changes.
   This process will take a while if you have a lot of links. If you want to watch the submission process at work, make the very bottom frame bigger - this is where each URL is being submitted to dmoz, one at a time. Watch your browser logo in the upper right corner - when it stops spinning, or flashing, or whatever, for a while, that means the submissions are all as done as they are going to be. This tool can't tell you whether submissions worked or not - as a humble JavaScript, it can't check the results the Open Directory CGI returns. You have to manually go to the categories involved, hit refresh (or even shift-refresh) on your browser, and see if things worked.

6. Help, it jammed!
   First, are you completely sure it jammed? Sometimes it just looks that way. As long as your browser symbol is flashing or spinning or whatever, it is just waiting for the ODP CGI to respond. We are putting a heavy load on poor DMOZ, after all! Even so, still, sometimes in the middle of a long series of submissions, it will just stop. :-(. This does not always happen, and when it does, not always in the same place. It also happens more if you are doing something else on your computer while the submissions are going on. It probably has something to do with timeouts, and more to do with the generally flaky nature of JavaScript. Anyway, the thing to do is to figure out how far it got (look on the page you were editing), then uncheck the boxes in the middle frame for all the links that worked, and resubmit the ones that didn't. Prayer doesn't hurt either. :-). You don't have to go all the way back to redoing the search.

7. If you are using Internet Explorer, ignore any JavaScript error.
   If it doesn't affect the process, you're lucky. If it does, you probably can't use this tool at all. Netscape doesn't seem to have this problem.

Based (heavily) on work by George Ruban (gruban), October 1999, modified by Eric Sechrist (newwave) in April 2000, and again in January 2001.. Parser rewritten in Perl by Richard Fuller (rpfuller) in March 2001. Newwave's version was better, all hail newwave. All praise should go to newwave, all complaints to rpfuller. Thanks. :)