webdoctor - 3:24 pm on Dec 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

If "backups may not be a priority", then whoever had that, must have considered it not worth recovering if it was lost

I quoted the phrase "backups may not be a priority" directly from your earlier post. Was that simply your conjecture or do you have inside info from AOL?

I kinda agree with that statement with the ODP, if it made me nothing, and cost me, and everyone considered it not a priority, then why bother

If everyone hates the ODP so much, and it's so useless, then surely all we have to do is ignore it and/or build a replacement. As far as I recall, Google gained users from Altavista, and Altavista essentially died off, because Google was simply better, not because thousands of bloggers spent their time posting "Altavista is dead!".

Why do we all spend so much time discussing ODP/DMOZ if it's already dead-and-buried?

The question should be, did Brett learn from this experience, and is he getting good backups now?

Agreed. Based in part on your comments, I think the key point for those in charge of DMOZ is not "should we pull the plug on this project" but instead "did we learn from this experience and are we getting good backups now".

Good hindsight is really easy (and often unhelpful).

Good foresight is substantially harder.