In an editorial entitled Moved URLs and the Maintenance of the Project the Editor referred to the problems associated with maintaining a large collection of links to websites when a significant number of changes occur over a single year.
The Editor has reached the conclusion that, in order to keep maintenance costs of the Project reasonable, it is necessary to place a limit on the total number of websites in the Project WITHOUT a URL in standard domain-name format (that is, without a permanent URL). That maximum is now set at 716, the value current when the decision was taken (July 7, 1997).
Requests to include websites that satisfy the guidelines of the Project, but do NOT have a URL in standard domain-name format, will not be processed until we can discover (during routine checking of links) that another website already in the Project has changed from a non-permanent URL to a URL in standard domain-name format. In practical terms, this may mean a delay of three or four months, compared with two weeks or less for websites that have no problems associated with them.
If this restriction does not keep maintenance costs of the Project within reasonable limits, then additional restrictions will have to be applied, for example: completely rejecting requests to add websites without URLs in standard domain-name format, or even removing websites already in the Project whose URLs are not in standard domain-name format.
The domain name is a technical construct designed to reduce some of the problems currently found on the Internet. But it doesn't help unless it's used.
Jim Parrott
The Editor
Scholarly Societies Project
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