Dead links and other problems

[wbeckman]

Hello there. I've been looking through some of the cats here and have some comments as well as see a few problems you may want to know about.

E.g., in cat http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/42491,

Absolute Asia - title is actually Absolute Travel

Asia Hotels and Resorts, Discount Hotel Resort - "Discount Hotel Resort is currently on maintenance.." is a statement on all of their pages.

Hugh's Asia... - can't be found.

IndochinaGuide.com - "Directory Listing Denied"

PlanetHoliday.com - appears to be an affiliate of precisionreservations.com/

Divingthai.com - appears to be all in Thai, is that what you really want?


In http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/70218,

the one entry, Betel Box Hostel in Singapore - wouldn't it be better under Singapore than in Asia?


In http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/63212

Excel Golf Singapore - no content, goes to a German site for sale maybe.(?)


In http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/63217,

Nursing Cares - I don't see what this has to do with Asia.


I can see a number of other "problems", but I am looking from an ODP perspective and what is done there may well not be what you do here.

[tlpretender]

Hello wbeckman,

Sorry for the delay in the response. I don't lurk in the forums as often as I used to.

I haven't checked yet, but I believe most of those problems would have been fixed with the last crawl of the Skampy spider. The regional topics are all being reworked so there are a lot of sites in wrong topics that are being corrected.

Good research there BTW.

[wbeckman]

I was just rummaging around the directory a bit, especially in this Indonesia cat. (http://www.skaffe.com/viewCat/1490) There's a lot missing, of course, like provincial information as well as others, like lodging. It's not unusual that much is missing, but I have a general question. Large directories like dmoz have a huge amount of the same info that Skaffe and other smaller directories have slots for but not the actual data (lots of MT or non-existent cats.). If you ever intend to fill these, why not start with data already in large directories but just be more selective.

In the dmoz Jakarta cat, there are 51 hotels listed while Skaffe has none. What's wrong with starting a similar Skaffe cat and pick and choose from the dmoz listing what hotels you might place in Skaffe? You'd have to rewrite the descriptions, of course, but the core data are already in place. Overlapping sets of data can't be unusual in that the data are what they are; so if you're going to fill in the slots there will necessarily be redundancies anyway. I'm sure many of the listings that are currently in Skaffe are also listed in larger dir's already. Why not simply copy relevant urls from any place you happen to find them and list these in one's own directory? That's probably an important mechanism the larger directories themselves used to get to the size they are.

[tlpretender]

That certainly is what a lot of editors do to build their topics and is fine. It deserves to be mentioned again that the descriptions need to be rewritten.

The main thing needed to fill the gaps though are folks interested in the topic and that have the ability to edit. It is a slow process.