Open Directory Project - Controversy and Criticism

Controversy and Criticism

There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition. Such allegations are fielded by ODP's staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices. In 2003, ODP introduced a new Public Abuse Report System that allows members of the general public to report and track allegations of abusive editor conduct using an online form. Uninhibited discussion of ODP's purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream Webmaster discussion forums. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by ODP founder Rich Skrenta, has more than 17,000 listings.

Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone or CNN, editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites. Links to individual CNN articles have been added until 2004 and have been entirely removed from the directory in January 2008 due to being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain. Such experiments have not been repeated later.