News and Announcements

When the earth is trembling beneath your feet...

...it may be an effect of the big server move: AOL has recently invested in new servers for ODP, and staff is now moving enormous piles of spaghetti code from the old to the new servers. So far, the newsletter editing team hasn´t been able to get technical details and pictures of the new servers, but we won´t give up...
The following servers have already been successfully replaced:

Next in line is chefmoz. All in all, things worked well so far: some downtimes but no major bugs, the forums are threatening to violate the speed limit, and Robozilla came back from the move fresh, healthy and as hungry as we love him. So, next time you meet a technical staffer, don´t forget to give him a good pat on the back!

Mother Frog and her little tadpoles

Frog is a new quality control tool, developed by plantrob and released on April 6, 2006. It is accessible to toplevel editors and cateditall+. The tool works as follows:

  1. The technical metas feed Frog with listings that have been identified as potentially troublesome by automated processes: these listings may be broken... or not. Human eyes are needed to decide Shocked
  2. The toplevel editors and cateditall+ define a category they want to work on, and how much listings they want to process.
  3. Frog creates a suitable set of listings, called "tadpole".
  4. The editors process the tadpole.

Editors can find more information about Frog and its spawn in the editor forum thread. To get an idea of Frog´s impact on quality control, you may want to take a look at the March 2006 report.

Table of Contents

Home Quantity versus Quality The Category Check Zeal Closure Many Roads Lead to Rome...Uses of the Open Directory

News Beats

Adult Arts Business Games Kids and Teens News Recreation Society World

Regular Features

Editorial News and Announcements Projects New Editalls and Metas New Editors Meet the Team Newsletter Index Past Issues

Paint! Paint? We need more paint and brushes!

The ability to note URLs has been added to the cateditalls´ and kcateditalls´ permission portfolio. This will considerably enlarge the number of people who can process your requests for the useful little communication helpers.

Spider food? Ouurgh!

Spider food, lead generators and content mills have been added to the list of sites which are not welcome in ODP. At the same time, trustworthiness has been added to the criteria to consider when adding sites. If you´re interested in details and background information, please see the discussion thread in the editor forum.

Spring Mozzies 2006

I Voted MozzieThe Spring round of the biannual Editor Awards took place in April. Congratulations to all winners, runners-up and nominees. And thank you to enarra and samiam for managing the awards!

The battle for the attention of the community was undisputedly won by the candidates for "Most 'Evil' Meta". miriamferrari misunderstood "divide et impera" as "split yourself to rule", tried to run twice in the election (once alone and once in a most evil alliance with cmic), won twice... and insists now that editors address her as "Her Double-Evil Highness".

The prestigious "Biggest Luzer" award was not on the list for the Spring Awards, but that didn´t stop the usual suspects of campaigning for the honours. The poll was set up by rpfuller in person, so please don´t ask how the result was calculated... not that any cheating was necessary, after his breathtaking overhaul of the dashboard design some days earlier (the dashboard note in fuchsia red and all interfaces scrolling, just in case that you made the mistake not to hit that button on April 1st...)

Oh by the way... what are we doing in here all the time?

Actually, that´s a lot easier to find out today, compared with a year ago: Since the beginning of 2006, monthly reports have been published, offering stats and a short overview on recent achievements:

Top

Please send all comments, questions or suggestions to the newsletter editor.