You are simply wrong in several ways.
#1 is, contrary to your assumption, the kind of abuse most often successfully reported, and many of the reports come from submitters. The reports come in the form "how come xxx is listed if my site can't be -- it's even worse." And in a large majority of cases, they are right. So we welcome these reports, set up multiple official channels for them, investigate them quickly, and go a long way towards tolerating them even when they are made by inappropriate channels. And it has been well worth while -- regardless of the submitter's motives, they have been finding and reporting problems.
Regarding #2, I'll go through the logic slowly, and avoid the obvious assumptions.
If a site has not been rejected, then it's pretty clear that it hasn't been INAPPROPRIATELY rejected, right? But by far the most common STUPID abuse reports are of the form "my site hasn't been listed yet, some editor must be refusing to list it." And by far the most common public allegations of abuse are of this form.
The accusers have two different gambits from here. One is the assumption that "the editor isn't reviewing my site because I'm being singled out for special inattention." That's why we editors spend so much time telling people how the ODP actually works, so they can understand the inner workings. Once the facts sink in, people realize how idiotic and insulting an allegation like this is. The honest ones will say something like "oh, I didn't understand how things worked. I see how that was a pretty silly idea." The malicious ones say, "I don't appreciate knowing the truth, because it interferes with my paranoia."
And the clueless but cynical often jump to the conclusion that "I need to be able to investigate this -- I need evidence." But people who are so ignorant as to jump to this conclusion simply aren't competent to handle evidence. They should have exercised simple logic on the evidence they already have first.
If a site has been rejected, then there is at least a possibility of inappropriate rejection. So there's no point in investigating abuse -- as a few simple arithmetic facts will show, we have 50 billion cases of "not reviewing a site" every day! In fact, that isn't abuse, even though it is not what you want.
But you can see for yourself, using just the evidence available to anyone on earth, without looking at any editor logs, how much of a possibility of abuse there is here. All you have to do is read the guidelines, then do some reviewing of sites that HAVE been listed, to see if other sites are being treated the same way. There are only two possibilities, and you can think about
If other sites ARE being treated the same way, then ... you have no evidence of inequitable treatment. We're not being unfair, we are being fair -- but we are simply following our mission, not yours. Our guidelines are public, but -- like most "guidelines", cannot be fully understood without some experience at trying to follow them.
If other sites ARE NOT being treated the same way, then you have an indication of abuse. But how to turn this into evidence? Well, there are two ways to look at this. First, you don't have to collect the evidence (and this is a point that I thought should have received more emphasis from the editorial side of the trenches.) And there's nothing you can do with it -- if you gave it to us, we certainly couldn't just take your word for it. (We get many false and malicious abuse reports!) So there's no reason that you should be able to collect it.
Second, it doesn't matter whether you have evidence. We want to look at the indications. Even if there is no abuse, there may be a problem we should fix! So insofar as your complaint is about being unable to collect evidence, it's not a problem. We put the data out so that people can find websites. What else they do with it is not our concern. (The fact is, a clever person can often find evidence! But that isn't our concern either.)
And thirdly, if you can't handle the evidence already available, including the published ODP guidelines, the published ODP listings, and everything else on the web -- then there's obviously no reason to give access to internal ODP working documents.
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Another point on which I wish to respectfully disagree with other editors (that is, give a different perspective) is that I am less likely to ask for trust than some other editors are. I'll tell you up front -- you don't have to trust us: there are other directories, there are search engines, you can look anywhere you want for URLs, and you can do whatever checking you wish before using any information you get from ANY website. And I think you should do that! (In every human activity, IMO, too many people don't look for themselves, but just trust their own intuition, or trust what other clueless people say. I'd want people to do more checking. Certainly, the Open Directory has earned widespread respect for the comprehensiveness quality of its results. And that is much more important than any kind of trust, especially misplaced trust.
And this gets back to unrealistic webmaster expectations. We do not promise to list every site submitted; we do not promise to review any site within any particular finite time. But webmasters who DO trust us to do these things are the primary cause of idiotic accusations and inane conspiracy theories!
So we keep telling the truth about the ODP mission and practices. And when people understand that, concerns about "needing evidence" to "report abuse" will have been completely relieved. The honest people will stop making those absurd and insulting accusations -- and we'll know how much attention to pay to the others.
