hutcheson - 5:02 am on Dec 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

mcavic, that suggestion sounds a-priori reasonable. The editors discussed this at length, and disagreed. (I was one of those who thought it reasonable.) We took the ODP Show-ye-me approach: that is, those of us who thought it might be a good idea tried it. The test involved dozens of editors, and thousands of site suggestions. (I was one of the more actively involved testers.)

We came, we tested, we were shown. There is no longer any disagreement: it's a bad idea. Its contribution towards a better directory simply isn't significant enough to waste any energy figuring out how to do it.

Lots of people think it's technically easy. Anyone may have an opinion: however, I'll claim the right to having an INFORMED opinion, based on at least eight years of experience in each of optimizing compilers, very large low-level database libraries, and ODP editing. And I've actually tried to map out how such a thing might be done. The specifications, let alone the implementation, were complex enough that implementation would have been a high risk. (This from someone who'd rip out and replace an entire p-code interpreter at the drop of a small hat.)

But, when it gets down to it, we just flat really DON'T want to tell people their suggestion is worthless: in our experience, it can only encourage them to rise to new heights of deviousness; in practice, it has no other effect; it never has any beneficial effect; it harms our anti-spam efforts.

And for sites that do get listed, again we don't HAVE to tell people anything in particular, because we broadcast the fact to the world in general.

So it sounds like a good idea: but anyone who had really thought it through should have recognized that it couldn't possibly have any good effect -- and I don't blame you for not figuring that out, because it certainly took ME (and us) long enough, even looking at the evidence.

But ... we've experimented, we've been shown, and that's the end of all speculating. The issue is dead until there's substantial new evidence, pointing a different direction: and I can't imagine what form that could possibly take in this universe.