The "Service Temporarily Unavailable" is going to slowly become a permanent fixture. On purpose. Nail in the coffin #1. The month-long "technical glitch." I do believe this is a planned outage to increase the rate of editor attrition and send a message. Nail in the coffin #2. Site submission is disabled under the guise of yet another technical problem. DMOZ's owners want to kill DMOZ. Editors may curse site submissions, and pretend they seek out sites without any help, but this is not to be believed, as a whole. Editors will be made to feel like galley slaves in a ship without a captain or a crew. I believe AOL will purposely rotate the functions being disabled, randomly lose data, etc., until the remaining hardcore editors begin to defect to Wikipedia and Google Co-Op, find less frustrating hobbies, or make babies.
Does anyone even care? We are here only to get our posts count up so we can make more money from forum's ad revenue sharing - hmm it seems I have forgotten to place my adsense id no wonder I'm not making anything.
You heard it here second: When DMOZ does come back, there are gonna be some very disappointed people here. (and I believe that it will be back and hopefully it won't be to much longer) Apparently so, some appear sadly obsessed with it.
Until then....the lie that was said that it was a Software/Hardware problem would be a mark in the forhead just like a Jaf'ar. I'm just obsessed with its extinction. P.S. I am also obsessed with Italian Real Estate and Vulcano's in particular.
Surely not. Look at all of the people dying to get in. There are 10+ threads started each day of people trying to get in. It it is irrelevant, it still has one helluva buzz.
That doesn't make it relevant. All those people are "dying to get in" in the mistaken belief that a DMOZ listing will somehow vault their sites in the search engine rankings. It won't. It's just another link - assuming you can even get the site listed.
No, that's not the sole reason. When I do a lot of searching, I end up seeing DMOZ placing high and I'll take a peek in there. Simple folk looking for something do, too - which more simple folk are coming to the web in mass numbers. Saavy people may know DMOZ is not all it's cracked up to be, but many people, probably 90% (10/90 rule) don't. There are more ways to get seen by your potential user base then just placing high in search engine rankings.
Show me someone who is not an editor or webmasater, or who is not a friend or family member of an editor or webmaster, who has ever even heard of DMOZ. Face it: People other than those mentioned above simply do not use DMOZ for anything at all. And knowledgeable webmasters don't typically use DMOZ to find anything except their own sites because they know DMOZ is out of date and becoming more out of date with every passing month.
interesting point - why then do some of the search engines still use them? (I may be asking a weird question here - forgive me) I noticed that they have been down for quite a while and I too started to think that it was for that reason - would be interesting to see what the final outcome is
I know many including my wife who asked me how to get her company's website into DMOZ. Further, they don't need to know what DMOZ. My mother doesn't know what Google is. The fact of the matter is when you start searching, you're likely to run into DMOZ. That's all you need to experience to see why there is an allure to the website, whether it's relevant to you or not.
Absolutely true. In early days I heard of DMOZ after 8 months of owning a website. I would also add that even new webmasters have not heard of DMOZ. They hear it when they see threads like this That there was something like DMOZ which is not taking any submissions right now. And webmasters are whining to get in. So they also join the que and start crying to get their sites listed in DMOZ.
Most people I know have barely heard of Google (when I get Adsense checks everyone acts as if they are some kind of fraud) and even fewer know how to actually use it to find anything, asking them about DMOZ would be like asking them if they know any psychologist in Ottawa. When I created history category for Croatian language it actually had few days of life since I posted it to local newsgroup to get feedback so I can add any website which I missed.
1. which search engines? 2. define "use them"? how do they use them? That makes little sense. How are you going to run into DMOZ by searching? I cannot recall the last time that happened to me.