As some of you may have noticed, submitting a site to DMOZ has been impossible for almost a month, apparently since October 23rd. The world’s biggest human-edited directory’s servers crashed, and all the pages that you’re able to see right now are static pages coming from their backup.

There’s also another reason behind DMOZ outage. Jean Manco, who is a DMOZ editor and also a member of Cre8asiteforums revealed something interesting in this thread:

There was a crash. The public side was recovered fairly easily. (It’s just a static copy though.) The real problem has been with the innards – the editing side. Don’t ask me what exactly went wrong. But it was catastrophic. Editors haven’t been able to edit at all since it happened.

The silver lining is that the new set-up that AOL has been working on in the wake of the crash should be an improvement. And we hope to see it in action fairly soon. I can’t give an estimated time for lift-off though. Nor can I promise that submissions will be switched back on as soon as editors can get back to work. There may be technical reasons for a time-lag on that.

Well, it’s good to hear that there is a serious reason behind this outage, but even if DMOZ goes back up tomorrow, we will still have to wait a year or two before seeing our sites listed! 🙂