If you log into your DMOZ editor account today, you'll see the following message:
On October 20th, the DMOZ editor server experienced a serious failure. The technical issues have been resolved and the site is back up and working.
You are now able to log in and edit just like before. However, despite the best efforts of our staff, not all of the data could be recovered. The public side is intact, but unfortunately, a significant amount of the editor-only data is lost. The programmers will continue working on the recovery process while we return to editing.
DMOZ was down for 2 months. While it was gone, though, I noticed something. I never actually used DMOZ to find anything -- ever! Furthermore, search engines did just fine ranking content without those prompt updates that DMOZ editors make :) I do suspect that a large proportion of DMOZ traffic is disgruntled submitters giving the directory the evil eye. Perhaps that's why it crashed in the first place?
So why should you -- or anyone really care? Obviously AOL didn't. The fact that AOL did not do regular backups of DMOZ makes me wonder if anything is safe there, either.
"Humans (probably don't) do it better," but I'm even less sure about AOL humans ...
December 19th, 2006 at 2:57 am
Oh, AOL did do backups. They just didn't know how to *restore* them these past eight weeks
December 19th, 2006 at 10:41 am
I've used it for helping my "internet research" in regard to topics mainly related to history. I just quickly check there first before I attempt to sift through SERPs manipulated by people like us.
December 20th, 2006 at 6:36 pm
All that i have seen from DMOZ is old and outdated content with little relevance. Although i may be wrong in saying this as i am one of those disgruntled users who cannot get my sites reviewed and listed!
Hopefully once they open submissions again i will become a happy DMOZer.
December 27th, 2006 at 7:16 am
[...] A little while ago I reported that DMOZ had risen up from the ashes. But DMOZ was still hiccuping and not 100% back to normal. [...]
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
[...] 5. ever heard of a wiki nazi? with any society, when the ‘police’ get out of control it turns ugly. I think of my personal wikipedia experiences HERE and the laughable case of the linkbait page where all the references to Matt Cutts the google engineer and blogger were savagely culled. They were only reinstated after uproar from the SEO community. Fools. So in conclusion, I see too much power with too few. fast erosion of goodwill. open day for the spamming community. dictatorship with a community front. Too many things on the boil at one time. And the core principles of ‘give and take’ being eroded with Wiki. All this will probably come to an unhappy ending much like DMOZ [...]