Greetings from the JRD Editorial Team,

The Joomla! Resources Directory has seen some excellent growth since it's inception back in June of this year. 

We started out with an overwhelming response from community members to help us 'test drive' the new site and then an absolute FLOOD of listing submissions when we launched the site for public use.  This proposed a few problems.  Mainly, there's only 4 of us active in the editorial team.  Don't get me wrong, we work great as a team but that initial workload for four volunteers with full time lives was trying for all of us and especially for the many
patient people waiting to have their listings approved. 

What made things even more difficult was the number of listings submitted that either did not meet the basic TOS, or had a few unresolved or not submitted trademark issues with OSM. Or both. Part of our 'job' as editors is to make sure that all published listings are in compliance with any use of the Joomla name, symbol or site content.  On a rough guess I'd say maybe one in every ten of those first submissions met all of the required criteria for such use.  This caused a rather large backlog in the JRD. 

Fast forward to July, and we released the JRD Approval Checklist.  A policy where we require all owners of new submissions to copy/paste the list and answer it in an email to team[at]resources[dot]joomla[org].  We announced this in a blog post as well as a permanent stickied forum post AND we emailed all registers members of the JRD at the time to inform them of the change in policy. 

Since then we've only been approving submissions from folks who have indeed emailed us with their JRD Approval Checklist.  That system has been working great.  We've been able to approve listings faster, communicate directly with listings owners, and work alongside OSM and the community to help empower people to use the Trademark in an approved way. 

However, that initial backlog of unapproved listings still sits in limbo and despite my public promise to delete any that didn't send us an Approval Checklist within 30 days of my emailing them... I didn't.  I wanted to allow a little extra window of time for people to get listed and send us the required info.  That was in August and now it's October (I know, where does the time go?).   So, I've decided that this coming weekend will be the time for the very overdue 'culling' of backlogged listings whose owners never did get in touch with us with their checklist information. 

So be informed!  If you submitted a listing to the JRD before September 1, 2009 and you have not yet sent the JRD Editorial Team an email with all of the JRD Approval Checklist items filled out, your submission will be deleted from it's unpublished state in the Joomla Resources Directory.  Yes, deleted.  As in, "no we can't approve your old listing because we deleted it."  Also, from now on we will be deleting all unpublished listings that do not send us the Checklist within 30 days of being submitted to the JRD. 

Fear not.  Just because we delete your old listing, it does not mean that you cannot re-submit it to the team with the required checklist information at any time that is convenient for you.  Honestly, we'd love to approve you.  So get in touch with us and we'll do our best to work with you to make that happen. 

On a more general note, as I write this we are sitting at 161 published JRD listings.  I'd like to thank each and every listing owner who has taken the time to send us the checklist and especially those who have taken the time to go through the appropriate steps to have use of the Joomla trademark approved on your websites.  Further to all those who have expressed their appreciation and those who have offered suggestions and even those who have made complaints, Thank you.  Your feedback helps us to improve the directory. Keep it coming! 

If you'd like to get in touch with us, feel free to comment to this blog, send us an email to team[at]resources[dot]joomla[dot]org or drop a note in this forum.

That's all for now!  Stay tuned for some exciting announcements from the JRD team in the near future