This area has turned into a bit of a ghost town. Many of the regulars have moved to other forums, given up their directories or mainly lurk. Unfortunately, there continues to be no "they" to moderate much of DP nowadays.
Obviously, there are some people here interested in directories, and I do like to keep in touch. But I have plenty to do on the phpLD site. The last year has been great for phpLD in terms of getting together a good crew, and many of our programmers have matured and really know there stuff now. We've been steady through the recession, and I have nothing to complain about. I couple of months ago, I replied to something in marketplace the wrong way, and got an infraction. I was actually happy about that because it was good to see there are people helping to keep people straight. Hopefully, they are starting to get a groove now. We'll see.
It's unfortunate, but the spammers are finding ways around -or rather through- the captchas. Banning an IP isn't a great fix (dynamic IP's, proxies, etc) - and banning common spam words opens up a can of worms. Then even on top of all that, a lot of the listings that aren't *spam* might as well be. Too many people submit garbage. Glad to hear it's culled down the junk Yolander is looking really, really good.