[2] As of September 2017[update], a non-editable mirror remained available at dmoztools.net,[3] and it was announced that while the DMOZ URL would not return, a successor version of the directory named Curlie would be provided.

[7] DMOZ was founded in the United States as GnuHoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for Sun Microsystems.

Skrenta had developed TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems.

After Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the use of Gnu in the name, GnuHoo was changed to NewHoo.

[9] Prior to switching to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October 1998 and became the Open Directory Project.

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors.

In January 2006, DMOZ began publishing online reports to inform the public about the development of the project.

[12] On October 20, 2006, DMOZ's main server suffered a catastrophic failure[13] that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006.

As DMOZ became more widely known, two other major web directories edited by volunteers and sponsored by Go.com and Zeal emerged, both now defunct.

[16][17] The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile online content has been successfully applied to other types of projects.

The original divisions were for Adult, Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Shopping, Society, Sports and "World".

The ontology in non-English categories generally mirrors that of the English directory, although exceptions which reflect language differences are quite common.

[22] Key factors distinguishing this "Kids and Teens" area from the main directory are: By May 2005, this portion of DMOZ included over 32,000 site listings.

This included tasks such as the editing of individual listings to correct spelling and/or grammatical errors, as well as monitoring the status of linked sites.

Shortly after each run, the sites marked with errors were automatically moved to the unreviewed queue where editors may investigate them when time permits.

[25] DMOZ data is made available through an RDF-like dump that is published on a download server, older versions are also archived there.

The primary gatekeeping mechanism is an editor application process wherein editor candidates demonstrate their editing abilities, disclose affiliations that might pose a conflict of interest[citation needed], and otherwise give a sense of how the applicant would likely mesh with the DMOZ culture and mission.

[citation needed] DMOZ has its own internal forums, the contents of which are intended only for editors to communicate with each other primarily about editing topics.

Catmv privileges allow editors to make changes to directory ontology by moving or renaming categories.

[citation needed] There have long been allegations that volunteer DMOZ editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition.

[39] Early in the history of DMOZ, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as Rolling Stone or CNN, editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites.

[40] Links to individual CNN articles were added until 2004, but were entirely removed from the directory in January 2008[41] due to the content being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain.

[33][43] Robert Keating, a principal of Touchstone Consulting Group in Washington, D.C., worked as AOL's program manager for DMOZ beginning in 2004.

According to DMOZ's official editorial guidelines, editors are removed for abusive editing practices or uncivil behaviour.

[43] Some people find this arrangement distasteful, wanting instead a discussion modeled more like a trial held in the U.S. judicial system.

[57] The ODP Editor Forums were originally run on software that was based on the proprietary Ultimate Bulletin Board system.

These alternatives would allow communities of like-minded editors to set up and maintain their own open source/open content Web directories.

Chef Moz, an offshoot of DMOZ, was an open content directory of World Wide Web links of restaurants.

Chef Moz, similar to its parent DMOZ, used a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings.

[59] From its beginning in 2000 to November 2009 (when it became impossible for editors to log into the site), ChefMoz had grown to become the largest global directory of restaurants on the Internet.