What's going on with dmoz?

[deist]

Dmoz doesn't seem to be adding sites much in the last few months. Most categories indicated they haven't been updated since mid spring or earlier. I have 2 noncommercial high content sites with good traffic, and linked to by other relevant sites, and have submitted them to the right categories once a month since February with no luck. The last couple of times I submitted to Dmoz, which was in 2000 and 2001, my sites were added about a month after submitting. Is dmoz dying? It has a big responsibility given that that the yahoo directory is a snapshot of the internet circa 1997-98 and is virtually irrelevant. I don't understand how dmoz could be petering out with all of its volunteer help, but it looks like many of the volunteers just don't care anymore.
Or am I missing something?

[deist]

Also, I have submitted lots of changed and dead links in several categories, and that information hasn't been acted on either.

[steveb]

"Or am I missing something?'

You are missing the opportunity to read the multiple threads in this forum that explain what is going on.

[deist]

I'm reading them now smartypants :-)
This post was moved from where I originally put it in the search engine promotion category. I'm not a webmasterworld regular.

[choster]

deist,

Dmoz doesn't seem to be adding sites much in the last few months.

Depends on the area. It had been very difficult for editors even to log in for several months due to the load on the server. Currently the back-end dmoz.org systems are undergoing a massive expansion, and the editing side will be entirely unavailable until at least Monday, Pacific Time.

Most categories indicated they haven't been updated since mid spring or earlier.

What do you mean by most, and what do you mean by categories?

- Suppose a listing were added to Widgets/Blue on March 1 and another to Widgets/Blue/Spinning on March 10. Since the listings in Widgets/Blue haven't changed, it will still say the category was last updated March 1, even though there were more recent changes to its subcategories.

Moreover, the static pages on dmoz.org do not reflect the state of the database before it was taken offline, but are a snapshot taken from a backup made in June.

submitted them to the right categories once a month

If I recall correctly, new submissions overwrite old ones.

I don't understand how dmoz could be petering out with all of its volunteer help

Even though ODP has scaled much further than Yahoo managed, it is still seriously understaffed by almost every measure-- in proportion of the web to be catalogued, in proportion to the number of sites submitted by webmasters, in proportion to required maintenance on existing categories, and so on. There is a high rate of burnout, particularly in commercial categories but also other areas which receive large volumes of marginal quality submissions such as fan sites or personal home pages.

[g1smd]

Just in case these get separated in the thread list, most of the useful information is in: [webmasterworld.com...] but there are many others in the last 6 months with other relevant information.

[twilight47]

From an editors point of view, it's a little frustrating. I've added 6 new listings in the last month, but they've only been added to the editor side and not the public site. Our page hasn't been updated since they started preparing for their upgrade.
Other's keep saying that the public side will be updated anyday now, but that's been that way for a week.

[totalXSive]

There have been some problems with updating the public side which has prevented the process from occuring. I'm not sure of the details but all I know is that's its been put on hold.

In comparison with fixing bugs with the internal systems and getting the editing forums online, it's quite a low priority. Autumn, the head of the technical side of DMOZ, was still at work after midnight last night ensuring the forum data transfers were successful.