Your Netscape bookmarks page works, but basically any page with
links and possibly followed by short descriptions of those links should work.
Do NOT
use this as an excuse to just steal a Lycos search results or Yahoo category page
and claim it as your own - the entire point of the Open Directory is that
we are better. When, not if, you are noticed stealing links,
Skrenta will revoke your editor privileges.
That said, there are still times when you want to add a bunch of links at once,
if only as a starting point for further editing, just make
sure the end result is your work, not someone else's.
If you have the page saved on your computer you can open it with a text editor
(Notepad, SimpleText, Emacs), or you can just select "View source" in your Web browser.
Select all, copy, and paste.
Control-A works as "select all" in Netscape on Windows, control-C is copy, control-V is paste.
Obviously, if you only want to add some of the links on that page, just
copy and paste the parts of the text you want, but you will get another chance to pick and choose later.
Use the / separated format, as given in the example left in the box for you.
It has to be a category you have editing privileges in, naturally.
If you want some of the links to go to other categories, again, you will get another
chance to pick and choose later, but this field is convenient if you want to put all or most of them
in a single place. You'll notice the default action is to add links to Unreviewed in that category,
if you want to add them directly to the category click the other radio button. Also if you want to
put a more sensible editor note than just "added with the multilink adder" on this action, please do that.
The parsing of the input HTML code could take a while if
you have pasted in a big page with a lot of links. Eventually
the middle frame will be filled in with the URLs parsed out of the HTML you pasted in - and random
assorted garbage coming from the fact that this is a heuristical URL parsing algorithm, and probably
as full of bugs as your neighborhood apiary. 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 add after all (uncheck the checkbox
before the URL), where you edit the URL titles or descriptions (please do add
descriptions, please!), where you pick the category that each URL should go into,
or where you decide that the parsing algorithm screwed up so badly that you want to punt on
this whole automated multi-link adding process, and do it the old fashioned way, one at a time,
by hand.
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 category
and see if things worked. If they didn't, you can come back here,
fix whatever went wrong in the middle frame, uncheck the URLs that worked out all right,
and submit again, until you are either satisfied, or decide that you would rather have
hot iron spikes driven under your fingernails than play with this godforsaken tool one more time.
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.