Re: Freeware, shareware, or both
Things had to get worse before they get better, but the "worse" is only from a website owner's perspective; the general public never noticed a thing when the data reverted to a version that is about 6 weeks old now.
You see, the ODP servers were so overloaded that a few months ago we reached a point that every other outside submit ended in a
500 Server Error and the submission was lost. The person had to start over. This caused some people to complain that they could not submit. However, did you (the "you" is not aimed at any one person here, by the way) ever stop and think that maybe editors were having problems too? Yes, we were, and lots of them. Some days, every other edit, sometimes every edit had the same problem. You would write a nice title and description, hit submit, and the work would be eaten. We all quickly learned to copy and paste to and from a text editor, before submitting anything, but it still didn't help your patience to have to submit something ten times before it took.
New servers were on order for many months, and the upgrades finally happened in June and July, and some parts are still being worked on. The editors now have a separate machine, which fliiiiiieeeeesssss compared to the old one that was shared with the public. Editing is now a pleasure, and not a task. In order to carry out the upgrade work though, the public side had to be frozen with data from early June while the edit side and site submission was down.
You shouldn't be worrying too much about what appears at dmoz.org as that will not account for much traffic. We don't "do Google" here, but their directory is at least 4 months behind the ODP version, even though the ODP has been banging out updated data nearly every week for the last 6 months. The final product of editor's work is not regarded as being the public viewable HTML pages at dmoz.org but rather the big data file that is available at
http://rdf.dmoz.org/rdf which downstream users collect to compile and update their own versions of the directory. That data is up to date, but a lot of well known sites don't bother to come back for updates as often as you might think they should. In fact, it is disappointing (to me) to see some ODP-clones still using data from two or three years ago, now sadly outdated, full of dead links, and virtually empty categories.
Although nothing to do with us what downstream users do with the data (as long as correct attribution is given for the use of that data) you might be better employed in trying to get some of the prehistoric clones to get a new copy of the RDF and update their pitiful renditions of the ODP to something a bit more modern.
Please take these comments as a general release of facts rather than a rebuttal of comments above or aimed at anyone in particular.
