ODP link checker and site removal

Stern123 said:

'Yes, we acknowledge this, and we are interested in moving forward, but it will take time, so in the meantime, please consider this temporary solution'

Click to expand...

No, I do not acknowledge that what you have mentioned in this thread is a problem for DMOZ.
Yes, we are interested in moving forward. It is just that we prefer to move forward on different paths. Everything that will improve the way editors can work and that would improve the directory as a whole have our priotities. A small issue of some sites being marked in error by mistake is not one of them.

> -Move pmoz to any other shared hosting which genuinely enforces a no-spam policy
How do you know it isn't already hosted on such a server. The Morfeus thing is most probably run from that server because one of the sites on that server got hacked. Did you already contact the hosting provider?

> -Move pmoz to dmoz.org or dmoz.aol.com (like Robozilla) for authenticity and verifiable reverse dns checks (like yahoo, google, or any other professional search engine/directory)
Not possible. We don't have access to those servers.

> -Just stop running pmoz BUT continue to use Robozilla to auto-tag websites
Not realistic. I repeat again: these tools do very usefull work for DMOZ and its editors.

> -Use pmoz as a secondary authority; only auto-remove sites if Robozilla also "agrees"
Not possible. We do not control Robozilla. AOL does.

> -Use pmoz to auto-remove site only if it gets consecutive 404s (page not found)
> -If pmoz gets a 403 (forbidden) or 50x (error) response code, always defer to Robozilla as the higher authority
This would imply an interaction between the tools. There isn't one and we don't have the options and resources to make these changes.

> but any of the above is worthwhile
In your opinion yes. In my opinion no. We have many more worthwhile improvements to make. And as we are very limited in resources we have to decide what to do and what to do not. The list of improvements is already large. Improvements that will make the live of editors easier or be for the overall quality fo the directory will have the highest priority. I can't see that we will ever make low priotity improvements as we jusy don't have the resources.

> I can't imagine why any of these improvements would compromise ODP's ability to weed out bad websites.
Most probably because you don't have insight in the internal workings of DMOZ.

The OP no longer has a problem and thus no longer needs us to fix anything.

His suggestions may or may not be possible to implement, but it's for sure that AOL won't be spending any money/effort on this topic and that there's no way to force the pmoz.info owner to do so either.

The thread would thus seem to have reached its natural conclusion - an agreement to disagree. Closing.