Today is my fourth anniversary of joining the ODP, and, despite my predictions, I managed to hit 25 000 edits today too :-D. So I'm rather happy at the moment :).
Part of the 'explosion' of edits has been related to a co-ordinated attack on people who hijack domains - registerings domains that were previously registered but have since expired and become available, and then putting alternative content on them - Ultimate Search being one of the more prolific of these companies. It's a particular problem for us because our data is available for free to download - you can buy Perl scripts for finding ODP-listed domains that have expired - and because Google uses our data too. New tools have appeared lately and as such we have been able to zap several thousand expired domains into obilivion - I've been one of the editors playing a large role in tackling the problem. Obviously I can't tell you how we do it because we don't want the hijackers to find out and then make it harder for us to catch them, but I can say that they should be under control now.
In other ODP news, besides the six nominations I already blogged about, two of the categories I edit in have nominations: York was nominated for "Best Category (500 to 5000 sites)" and the editors in United Kingdom as a whole have been nominated again for "Best Editing Team" - we were runners-up last year.
