Well it looks like our popularity may be our downfall.. at the moment I have over 6500 websites to approve, and given I check each one by hand, this means more work for me than I currently have time for.

So, until I get through the backlog, I have put a $5 fee on submissions.  It was never my intention to charge anything for a regular listing, however with the amount of submission spam I’m getting, I just have to stem the flow for a while until this is cleared.

I’m also hoping that this will get me off all the auto submit lists I appear to be on.  Less than 5% of sites submitted are even blogs!  If I can get off these lists then we may be able to open the directory up to free listings again in the future.

I’ll also be clearing the directory out of all blogs/sites that have re-applied the do-follow tag.  These all need to be done by hand, so it may take me a while.  I want this to be a good resource for bloggers and commentors alike!

out of the directory from the “Arts” section.

Next up with cleaning is the “Home” section!

I also have 1600 or so new submissions. Only around 1% of them actually comply with the requirements to be allowed into the directory. *sigh*