If AOL wished to rid itself of the ODP, how would it go about it?

Count me in, for love of the logo alone! But be aware that I won't touch the glass categories unless I am surrounded by a number of bodyguards and green muscle men that grunt menacingly when anyone tries to approach me.

 

Actually, are any of you aware of the Yahoo! bid to buy AOL?

If that happens, what do you think Yahoo will do with DMOZ?

I don't think anyone is interested in buying a rapidly decaying fossil like DMOZ either. But I can see someone buying AOL and then getting rid of DMOZ as an embarrassment and/or liability. At one time, Google may have had some interest but their recent moves have made it abundantly clear that they have decided it's easier to start over and do it right than to attempt to fix the fossil,

 

Hmmm... do you think AOL could care less about editor feelings? This is why they encourage kids to edit without getting parental permission in a directory with tens of thousands of porn links under the supervision of a porn webmaster with high level rights in the Kids and Teens branch. And appointed Admins who restored pedophile chat room links to public view for several weeks whilst they decided what to do with them. I'm not so sure they mind about shocking people, sparing their feelings, or doing the right thing.

As I say, if I were a commercially minded AOL executive then I would be looking at converting the dmoz.org domain into an outlet for the AOL shopping "directory" of paid adverts. That way it would make piles of cash. And it would probably take some time to reconfigure the servers.

But this is all idle speculation. There is no actual evidence that we are not just looking at a low priority botch job on a technical issue. And the whole thing might be back, as is, shortly. The October and November productivity figures will be very interesting. I reckon they will be down about 25,000 sites already including the routine dead links. Plus about minus 300 editors gone forever. Anyone for a sweepstake?

 

What??? I never, ever realized that... my eyes are popping out of their sockets. A porn webmaster with high level rights in Kids/Teens??? What are they thinking??? I would ask if you're joking, but I know you're not, and besides, no way this is funny.

I don't think AOL cares about editor feelings, as much I think they would want to kill off the ODP with as little public outcry as possible. All the people that are spending countless efforts on various forums as ODP advocates might turn against AOL on a dime, if the ODP is dumped too abruptly. I think AOL would be wise to starve the ODP slowly to minimize editor backlash.

 

And I was accused of Conflict of Interests.

Put me down for $50!

 

There are maybe a few hundred of us, serving and former editors, who actually care about the project. Of those the large majority would like to see radical change. Most with any sense will also have been feeling the demise for some time. If they cut it tomorrow then I can't see there being any backlash at all. The opportunity to take the RDF dump and salvage some of the effort over the years would be nice though.

 

Exactly as they are doing now. AOL is doing a great job of it and I wouldn't change a thing with possible exception of promoting the adult Meta to Admin position.

 

With the database structure not being good (heard here, so no clue how true it is), DMOZ is really not much of an asset. My guess is, at the moment, that the current fact that dmoz has been down for almost a month now (if not more) means that there are some very fundamental hardware or software problems. Given that the whole thing was unplanned makes the feel that it's a serious problem even stronger.
I agree: if they want to slowly make dmoz die, they are going in the right direction.

As for those saying: salvage the datadump: there are tons of dmoz-clones online - as well as directories that gave themselves a headstart by starting off as dmoz-clones and then just taking new submissions. The data is out there, no problem.