Control-A works as "select all" in Netscape on Windows, control-C is copy, control-V is paste.
You will get to pick and choose which links to affect individually later - the beginning of the
page is parsed to get the original category name.
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 - during parsing, this tool will prompt you not to select "Update"
for all the links of an "Unreviewed" page (see next step).
If you selected "Update" and you are editing an Unreviewed page, before parsing,
the tool will pop up a notice that it won't let you "Update" Unreviewd links in bulk, you'll have to
click each radio button individually. This is just to encourage you to actually review
each unreviewed link - you can still click each radio button individually (below) and
the tool will update them all in the end.
The parsing of the input HTML code could take a while if
you have pasted in a big page with a lot of links (and if you haven't, why are you using this tool?),
and during this time the middle frame could be blank. Eventually
the middle frame will be filled in with the URLs parsed out of the HTML you pasted in - and possibly
assorted garbage coming from the bugs in the parsing algorithm. :-).
Don't Panic, that's why you get the next step
to review the work.
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 the official ODP FAQ claims there is a rollback mechanism somewhere,
I haven't seen it! Check the list. Check it twice.
Again, 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.
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 copying and pasting
in the HTML.
George Ruban, October 1999