hutcheson - 7:32 am on Dec 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

I am interested in the technical details but not the finances. So I don't think any answer I gave would resonate with you. But you make a lot of assumptions which I don't accept:

(1) As for editors being in the dark or misinformed: I read skrenta's post, and I read the internal forums, and for that matter, I read these forums. And the more technically astute readers here were thinking pretty much along the same lines as my own mental picture of what was going on. It was obvious almost from the beginning, to any technically astute reader, that there were problems with the backups. I even mentioned that issue several times in public forums. My take is that rich misunderstood both what was said here, and what skrenta said, to make a much bigger difference than actually was. I don't know that skrenta has any more information about the current situation than we editors have, or has given any really significant details. As I said, I'm fairly technically inclined, and the additional details did not add anything to my understanding of the situation. It's clear enough that the problem wasn't all hardware, and it wasn't all operations. But both had problems. (Someone described it as a "perfect storm", and for anyone who hasn't personally sysadmin'ed a large heterogenous industrial-strength network, I think that conveys more information than any number of technical trivia.)

Skrenta's opinion on the organizational cause has some truth in it, no doubt (that had been an ongoing concern among editors for years), but I'm not fully of his viewpoint, and I don't think he has the whole picture. (For instance, even in the skrenta days the ODP never had a failsafe server. That was something the AOL folk were planning even before the outage.)

I'm sure that anyone who has extensive experience working with a large corporate sponsor for a non-income-producing activity has a useful opinion about what it takes for such a venture to be successful. That leaves out me and Rich both (and for that matter, skrenta is more of an entrepreneur spirit), so I'll just keep an open mind until I meet someone WITH a clue on THAT subject. But I know this: people who do know more than I do, seem to feel that finding another sponsor would not be difficult. (I've claimed otherwise in this forum before: so this is a tentative retraction of what I said before.)

But corporate sponsorship is not the only option. Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg are independent, and if it looked like AOL was about to abandon the ODP -- which it doesn't -- editors would be considering that option.

(2) Paid site reviews is still dead on arrival. Yahoo does that, and so far we've done better (at what matters to us) than Yahoo has done. We'd have to be insane and stupid both to give up what has worked better, in exchange for what hasn't worked as well! And that would be catastrophically disruptive for the community, most of whom signed on for something else. And besides, you'd have to be a pretty devious shyster as well as crooked to try to break the Social Contract that way--I don't think the ODP has the talent to do what. (There are probably some reasons I overlooked, but three impossible things is as much as I can manage after supper.)

But editors have been discussing what changes might be made. "Going on as before" is an option, but the outage has given us time to think about other possibilities. Of course, as anyone who's ever talked to an editor knows, the most popular change would be getting rid of site suggestions altogether. That's not the approach I prefer, but I could live with it. (I don't think the Social Contract would permit it, by the way.)

The challenge, as always, is to find a way of making use of information from people (site suggestors) most of whom are unreliable and some of whom are downright malicious. Is there a way, I keep asking myself, to let site suggestors build reputations? Or are frequent suggestors so invariably spammers that the issue doesn't arise? I haven't ever come up with a good answer. Other people are asking similar questions, though, and someone may yet come up with a good idea.

(3) The ODP isn't like a ponzi scam. It doesn't have to keep growing to remain alive. It has the flexibility to grow or shrink as circumstances change. The real threat would be a more effective methodology with a similar product -- and so long as no such thing exists, there isn't a threat from that direction.