Editor's own sites include gator spyware

[Guest rfsayre]

An editor of multpile categories has included his/her own site in both categories with different titles (i.e. "foobar" and "foo bar"), for search results I assume. These sites also contain Gator Corp and IBIS spyware, link farm stuff, amongst other generally low quality content. Other sites included in the category contain obvious affiliate links, viagra ads (off topic), etc.

 

Is this abuse or bad editing or both? What recourse is there?

[xixtas01]

It may be both, it may be neither. If you believe that an editor is acting in self-interested way and not editing in accordance with the guidelines, I encourage you to use the proper channels to pass that information along.

 

http://inelegant.org/report-abuse/

 

PS. There's no policy against listing sites where gator or other "spyware" is distributed. If the sites are appropriately listed, and the descriptions conform to guidelines, then I don't think this would be considered editor abuse.

[totalxsive]

An editor is free to do what they want with their own sites. We only care about whether the site is relevent to the ODP category it is listed in and whether it has sufficient content to be listed there. If it doesn't satisfy those requirements then we will do something about it.

 

If the site meets those requirements but still offers to install crud on people's computers then that is up to the individual editor, in which case you should take that up with he/she as a non-ODP matter.

 

An abuse report is probably the way to go in this instance - it will be looked at by the meta editors and if they feel it is serious then action will be taken. We do not tolerate editor abuse and welcome any help in stamping it out.