The_Contractor - 7:09 pm on Jan 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

5 times in 2004. I am no editor, but AFAIK dead links are not deleted autimatically. Is that still right?

No, that is not right;)

Why submitters? Did I mention submitters? Listing the best sites is the editors' task.

Yes, but the editors are not the ones that complain in most cases. Again, this has and always be in one's own opinion what sites are the best or relevant. If an editor went in and deleted sites which he deemed not to be the best, there would only be one listing in each category - since there can only be one best!

What do you think would happen if an editor started deleting listings that he/she didn't deem to be the best?

Well that is your personal opinion, but is there any objective reason for that assumption? As far as I have heard, some editors completely ignore suggestions whereas others rely on it.

Personally speaking I think over 50% of an editors time (sometimes %100) is spent moving submissions, deleting already listed appropriately submissions, investigating for mirrors/other problems, finding the new URL of a listing that's marked red/not found, and/or attaching notes etc. The directory would grow at a much faster rate if one's time was spent finding and adding listings.

Again, I think bringing up Alexa or any other measurement is irrelevant - the only people who care about that are submitters. Do you believe an average user of the ODP (or any other site) compares Alexa traffic rankings to anything?

Every dmoz bashing thread usually comes from those whom are not editors or are ex-editors with a chip on their shoulders. I remember a few years back when I had all these "bright ideas" and how simple things could be done to make things better/easier. Then I became an editor and logged into my control panel, gained more experience (and categories), and later realized it was whole lot different from the other side. I would never expect someone who has not been involved with the project to be able to see that it is a lot more efficient than you could ever imagine from the outside, or the amount of work people actually spend keeping it running as smoothly as it does. It doesn't matter if you are keeping track of 100 categories, that's still a fraction of a single percent of the number of categories in dmoz.

Relevant? I can find better serps in dmoz than I can many of the search engines most of the time. Do a search for some of your favorite terms (yes it times out often as it supposed to be a directory, not a search engine). If I do a search for london hotel for example I would much rather be faced with the results from dmoz than many search engines….

I know I'm one of the few, but I often use dmoz for researching almost anything under the sun…

added

I think perhaps this is a mis-phrase for "Is DMOZ becoming less important?" and I would say that since Google buried the directory in their mass of features instead of putting it on the front page, then the answer is yes.. DMOZ became less important.

Yep, that's true and it's also true that Google is showing your best backlinks first (or at all)when you use the link command..hehe
People don't understand that it doesn't matter one bit where/if "Google" links to dmoz - it will continue on.
How people can use this reasoning (link placement from Google) to gauge importance is beyond me... is your child less important because they sit in the 3rd row instead of the first row at school?