My name is Zilla, Rob O'Zilla. I am the dark lord of the ODP. I come out at night, in the witching hour, running amuck between all the editors listings, scaring them half to death. I obliterate 404 errors and bad URLs, making the ODP better than all the other directory listings out there.

But it is not all hard work for me, oh no. I play as hard as I work, and have been known to beat a few of the other staffers in a round of golf, out there on Palm Springs. It is said in folklore that I once beat the boss, Rich Skrenta, in a game of poker and he forfeited his house to me. I can not deny or support that rumor. However, come Monday morning, I am back to my job, hunting and sniffing out those URLs. Here's my typical day...

I get out of my bed at about 1 am, PST. That means, I am working whilst most of you are sleeping.. Some of you will have seen my trace, when I work, others may have caught a glimpse of me, but none has stopped to chat: I am a solitary beast.

I start my search by looking for the misformed http:// addresses. This is a new job for me, given to me by my boss, Autumn. She tells me my jobs, and by heck, I do 'em well. *ahem* - getting back.. So I start to look for those URLs, like, http://http:// or, htp:// or, http ://, or ones not present at all. Then, once I have discovered all of those, I reset the Red count, and release them for the editors to fix. There are normally about 1000 of these.

Then the real bulk of my work starts. I sit down, and visit all of the 1.9 million sites within the directory. Not once - oh no. But twice, over a two week period. I then visit them again in the third week, just before I release them to you, the editors.

Before you scream, delete and then run away, there are a few tips and tricks I can impart to you, which will make your life easier.

First, unreview all your reds. You will see where there are a large number of them from your dashboard, and they are marked in red so that you can see them clearly. What you should see on your dashboard is: 

Test: Foo: FooBar (298 new, 578 errors)

Then, once you have made sure that there are no listed error sites for the users to find, you need to go through the errors stored in the category unreviewed, and try to fix them. The first thing you'll need to do is visit the site. This will tell you if the server is alive.

If you find the server to be alive, then you can look for URLs higher up the tree, and try and locate the former page. You will probably find here that the page has gone, since the server has responded, but the page is missing. therefore, a 404 error.

If the server does not respond (common for smaller web hosts) then it is likely that the company's server equipment is inoperable, or that the URL owner has not paid their bills. You can check bill paying status here.

You may find that the page has been moved to an intranet, has an expired certificate, or has had its access changed. These errors are generally fatal, and it is unlikely that a solution will be found.

Finally, you can send a rogue URL to Nurey's team, who live in Test/Robozilla/Reds/. Include the name of the category it came from in the notes, and they will use special methods to find those strays. They are an elite squad, and, it is true to say that I have trained them well ;)

Oh, and my one unique add was..... ;) maybe next time :) 

-Rob O'Zilla