Are affiliate links ever acceptable?

i have recently submitted a site which contains news on a particular topic. (This is not a status request.)

Guidelines say that sites made up of affiliate links are very likely to be rejected.

If a site uses affiliate advertising in the same way large news sites use banner ads (i.e. usually above and to one side of content), does it still count as a black mark when it is being reviewed?

If my site had enough viewers, I would quickly switch to impression-based ads.

I would agree that affiliate farms should not be included in DMOZ. I wonder, however, if there a risk of a double standard - 'large sites with conventional banner ads OK, smaller sites with affiliate link banners not OK' - being applied?

We don't ban websites with affiliate links. We simply ignore the aff links and look at the unique and useful content on the website. If it's there, we can find it easily and its not totally swamped by the links, the site's passed the first hurdle.

An aff link farm leavened by a plagiarised chunk of the CIA fact book or whatever doesn't cut it.

Thanks for the clarification.

The usual heuristic applies. If the webmaster doesn't care about them, then we probably don't care about them. If the webmaster does care about them, then we almost certainly do care.

Of course, our care can only be to reject.