Well, I think Duo is clean in that they have a system and they stick to it, it's just that their system's faulty.
But what else they could do? I sold a story for a fixed rate of 10$, but it was 160 words, so it's more than a pro rate. Should the market be listed as Pro, if for 5000 words they'd pay 10 bucks as well?
"Pay ranges from Token payment (under 1 US cent per word) to Professional payment (5 or more US cents per word)" is just what it means -- the pay ranges. WP paid token and it paid Pro (if that's true), so the label's correct.
I agree. But the issue is more that they turn up on every search for a professional market. And as they also accept any genre they show up all the time when you limit the search to pro. All DT need to do is make sure that if you search for "professional market" you only turn up professional markets, not those that pretend to.
DT could stop this by having a category for token-pro.
Or by simply preventing those that, by their own admission, "predominantly pay token rates" from showing up in pro searches.
Or by not listing any magazine that won't list their precise pay rates the way they don't list any market with no online submission guidelines.
The issue isn't really DT, but they are enabling this and I am slightly shocked that they are so stroppy when asked about being used in this fashion. WP could easily state they are a predominantly token paying market on their DT page and their own page, but they choose not to so as do draw in more subs and gain the prestige that comes with that.
And Aggy, I contribute to DT precisely because they are such an awesome resource that do the hard work for us writers so we can focus on writing. But why do they need to get so huffy when we writers try and let them know when their awesome system is being taken advantage of? It would only take 10 or so WP pastime type markets (pretend pro markets) to turn up on their searches for the whole engine to be undermined.