Given that there is no way to mass select and publish / unpublish links (would have to do some db queries), I'd rather not mess with the validation part of the code - ends up sending emails etc.

Wasnt there a category suggest plugin? Did that auto-publish the category if suggested by a user or did it need admin approval (a bit confused right now, as one of the other link directories I use has this and I think I saw this functionality in a plugin related to lsql).