C-Pod Dictionary

Yes does not seem to be responding

The initial page is served up for me, but just hangs upon submission of anything for lookup.

Was down a day and a half for me, but finally working for me now.

Painfully slow Dictionary now though. I must admit, as much as I love this site, in my top 5 of all Internet sites, I shudder every time I hear that there will be maintenance or upgrades or server work. Because seems like invariably this will mean a temporary glitch with at least one of the features I utilize and at least in the short-term decrease the efficiency of my study time which I try to carve out from my work day/leisure time. I don't want to sound like a whiny little boy, but if I give ChinesePod 9s or 10s out of 10 across the board for content, community, customer service/responsivenss and value for money, I'd have to rank site reliability more like a 5 or 6.

The odd little glitch here and there does not bother me! I understand that for C-Pod to grow and improve changes have to be made and if a feature is not working for a short while there is plenty of other stuff available. Excellent site and brilliant content.

Do you people ever add to the CPod dictionary? I believe that free dictionaries like this are wonderful, but as a student I do have some inhibitions against adding to it myself. Suppose I look up a word in a different, non-free dictionary, would it be OK to copy that copyrighted definition into the Chinese Pod dictionary? If we did this on a big scale (we could, we are quite a lot of students around here), we would eventually copy the entire non-free dictionary into the free dictionary. That does not sound fair to me. On the other hand, you could argue that the Chinese and English languages as such cannot possibly be covered by copyright, and often the dictionary definitions are blindingly obvious and there is not room for much variation anyhow. A 猫 is a cat, how could you possibly express that differently? Can anyone hold the copyright of the word "cat"?

The only time I feel confident adding a definition to the Cpod dictionary (extremely rate) is when I lift it verbatim out of another dictionary, usually a print version. I can't believe there's much of a copyright issue with the definitions themselves.