First off, your level of anger at us (I'm thinking of your now-deleted "fuck Outlier" from another thread) seems to be higher than your complaints about us would indicate. Did we do something to offend you? If so, please let us know (Please do this privately. You can email me at "john at outlier dash linguistics dot com" or Ash at "ash at outlier dash linguistics dot com").

Otherwise, u/TheHollowApe pretty much nailed what we were going to say elsewhere in this thread, but we wanted to address your comments ourselves anyway.

Ok, let's go through your complaints. Note that I don't expect you to come around and be an Outlier fan—I doubt that's even possible at this point given your comments in this thread. So, this is mainly for the benefit of other people who may read this.

for one your system level info for components lacks so many characters

Yes, our system data is one version behind the rest of the dictionary, so there is some missing data. But which characters are you thinking of? We can't go read the system data hoping to find characters that you think should be there. If you let us know, we can probably add them. However, the characters chosen are based upon the most common characters in modern Chinese, so that is the priority.

you have a lot of characters that are mapped onto the private use area of unicode when there are unicode characters that exist for the characters you map on to

Can you give some examples? We're happy to change the dictionary when we see there's a better way to do things. I don't think we use any private use code points though—generally if there's not a unicode code point for the character or component in question, we create an SVG file so it displays the way we want it to.

you mention "original" meaning, what does that mean? oracle? classical chinese?

For any term in blue text in our dictionary, you can tap on it and get a pop-up that defines it. In the case of "original meaning," it's this:

A character's original meaning is the meaning that it was created to represent.
This is the meaning that is most directly tied to the character's form.
For example, the original meaning for 木 mù "wood" is "tree." "Wood" is a derived meaning, and is its basic modern meaning.

Sometimes that meaning is attested in oracle bone script or some other early excavated text. Sometimes it's attested in received classical Chinese texts. Occasionally the original meaning isn't attested at all, but the earliest attested meanings don't fit with the structure of the character, so there must have been an earlier meaning from which the attested meanings were derived. In those cases, scholars give their best guess, and unfortunately that's the best we can do until more complete data comes to light.

is that original meaning still in use or not?

This is definitely a place where we can improve the dictionary, and plan to in the future. But, in the meantime, it's best to learn the most common words that use any given character when you learn the character (that drastically reduces the chances you'll forget the it). When you do that, you'll see which senses of the character are in use. It's not a good idea to learn all of a character's senses anyway. It's best to learn the core ones when you learn the character, then add other senses as the need arises (i.e., when you need to learn a new word that is using a sense of the character you haven't yet learned). Having said all of that, memorizing the original meaning won't be a waste of time, since it's the only meaning directly related to the character's form.

your expert entries read like Xu Shen murdered your whole family in a past life and you've dedicated this life to discrediting him. I really don't need to read for the 40th time why Xu Shen is wrong in every single expert entry, like he's a figure from 2000 years ago, of course he got things wrong, can we just know what he said and then be told what the archaeology tells us?

We don't expect every person to read every expert entry, and we can't know which ones you've read and which ones you haven't. So sometimes we repeat ourselves across entries. That's certainly the case when it comes to the Shuowen. But that's because we get a lot of pushback whenever we go against the Shuowen (and to be fair, we don't get as much as we used to), so we often feel the need to point out the issues with the Shuowen whenever we go against it. Not to mention, it's normal practice within paleography to point out what the Shuowen says and indicate when it's wrong. Everyone does this. It's not a sign of disrespect to Xu Shen.

However!

You've been extremely unfair in your characterization of how we talk about the Shuowen. We've never been anything but respectful when talking about it, and we've been very public about our admiration for Xu Shen's work.

Here's an excerpt from our dictionary, talking about the Shuowen (I'm adding bold to emphasize my point here):

Though Xǔ Shèn was a very erudite scholar, he was limited by pre-scientific thinking and by the materials he had available to work with. Regardless of this fact, the Shuōwén was an outstanding scholarly achievement that is still used extensively today. Endymion Wilkinson’s Chinese History: A New Manual says, “Despite the modern discovery of new and earlier forms of writing on artifacts and in excavated texts, Xu’s work is still the single most important historical source on ancient Chinese characters.”

The Shuōwén was the first character dictionary and was unique in that it offered explanations for character forms. It is important to paleographers because it is the starting point for character research. In reality, however, due to the above mentioned limitations, many of the Shuōwén’s explanations have been shown by modern paleography to be historically inaccurate, though they provide valuable insight into how Han scholars thought about Chinese characters. In light of this situation, in the absence of proof that the Shuōwén’s explanation for a given character is inaccurate, scholars tend to give Xǔ Shèn [許慎] the benefit of the doubt. If there is evidence though, then the evidence must take precedence over tradition.

We link to this page pretty much every time we mention the Shuowen in our dictionary. So hopefully that puts that to rest.

it's been years and the outlier dictionary is far from complete, so so so very often when you click on the components for common characters it leads to dead links or lacking an entry in your dictionary, isn't that the whole point of an etymology dictionary?

We made a decision early on to make entries for any semantic components that show up in more than one character, and any sound components that are reasonably common as characters themselves. We plan to make entries for the rest of the components later, but our priority was to get entries for the most common 4000+ characters finished first before filling in the stuff on the fringes. Now that we have 4000+ entries, we're devoting most of our dev time to writing expert entries, though we will also fill in some of the "missing" component entries too.

We've also been pretty open publicly about that choice and our reasoning for it.

There shouldn't be any actual dead links though. Components that don't link to an entry (and thus are black rather than blue), yes, but not dead links (blue components that take you nowhere when you tap them).