Rolling Up The Sleeves

Tonight felt like old times! I have been here and gone and here again so much lately that getting into a rhythm and working on editing and meta tasks has been tough.

First thing is that I jumped right into my email and feedbacks.  I had quite a few regarding various topics.  Some general questions, some fan mail, some hate mail, you know the usual ODP editor mail bag.    After I had dealt with all of them that needed attention, I managed a tweet about it before heading off to the forums.

I perused the Editor Forums and also those at RZ to see the highlights I have missed over the last few days.  Didn’t appear to have missed a whole lot though.  Many of my feedbacks caught me up on the most important topics of concern.

After I had sufficiently rotted my brain in feedbacks and forums, I rolled the old sleeves up and did some abuse investigations.  I must be a masochist, because I tend to enjoy abuse hunting and investigations.  There are always a comments about whether abuse reports are ever investigated, and the answer is yes they are.  All abuse reports are taken very seriously and the Meta’s that specialize in them.  I don’t claim to be a specialist and I am not even in the ball park with the better abuse hunters, but I enjoy swatting abuse and clearing reports when I can.

To give you an idea of the amount of work that goes into investigating and resolving an abuse report, this might put it into perspective.  I spent about 2 hours working on only a couple of reports.  One doesn’t count, because it was just a duplicate report of another pending and in an area that I don’t work.  I couldn’t do anything more than just close the duplicate report.  The others took up the bulk of my time and were all positively resolved with no abuse found.

The majority of abuse reports that I have worked through generally turn out to be either a lack of interested editors in the area resulting in little or no activity, which is not abuse.  Or simple cases of correcting quality control issues such as parked sites needing removed, redirects, typo corrections, etc.  Again not abuse.

For more information on what is abuse, check out http://report-abuse.dmoz.org/faq .  The FAQ provides a more clear explanation of what constitutes abuse.  While on the subject of Reporting Abuse, quality control issues are not abuse and the Abuse Reporting System should not be used to report quality control issues.  If you see a listing in the directory that needs to be corrected or removed per the Editing Guidelines, use the update a listing link at the top of  the category and suggest the changes that are needed.  Abuse reports require the attention of Meta editors willing to tackle them.  URL updates and quality control issues can be processed by any level of editor with permissions in the category that they reside and likely will be dealt with quicker via the update link than via an abuse report.

Happy Birthday Old Friend

No other purpose for this post, other than to tell an old friend happy birthday!  So gunner:

Happy “29th” Birthday my friend!  Where would I be now, had you not suckered me in and took me beneath your wing.  I will always appreciate the guidance and friendship you have always given me.  Best wishes to you and your family.

I lift my glass to you “big brother”  and wish you a very happy birthday now and always.

Cheers!

Importance Of Backups

My goodness its been a while since I last had time to sit down at my keyboard and pen some thoughts.  To anyone who has wasted time in checking back, sorry. 

Things have been extremely busy the last couple of months, as my real company has been going through a small face change and relocation.  Nothing major, just expanding our horizons.  However we learned today something that DMOZ learned a while back, and it is a hard lesson to learn.

We have been down for almost a week, transitioning to our new location.  Our last business day was this past Saturday.  We fired up our server for the first time since Sunday morning and predictably it imploded.     “No big deal” says our IT guy, we just swap out our server machine with a new temporary one, restore from one of his two Saturday automatic (redundant) backups and we build out a new server to copy new transactions on too.   Smooth, quick and painless…..

Fast forward two hours later….  Well wouldn’t you know it, his two automatic, redundant backups failed on each day Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, none of which through the normal error flags alerting anyone to failed backups.  Fortunately for him, I am a paranoid freak about our data.   My last work day (real work, not boxing and moving day) was Friday and used my archaic manual backup process to save copies of all data through close of business on Thursday.

Result was tomorrow we will be able to restore everything but Friday and Saturday relatively easily.  The bad news is, we get sit down and manually re-enter $20,000 in lost sales transaction data.  It could have been much, much worse had I not been a dinosaur in my old ways and manually made backups each and every day I am working.  Three cheers for being an old fart I guess.

The lesson learned here today kids, never trust an automated backup that your IT guy says keep you covered with plenty of redundancy.  Make sure for yourself that you have good backups every chance you get.
Sorry to those who have sent messages to me that I have been missed around DMOZ and BOTW.  I am really, really sorry that I have been mostly non-existence for far two long.  I truly hope that I can get back to some normalcy in a few weeks after we get real life settled back down.

Regards.