The site was divided into two main areas: lists of specific contests and relationships between judges and winners which suggested evidence of impropriety, and a forum for the discussion of ethical behavior in the poetry world.
[1] Foetry.com received press coverage both positive and negative in such outlets as the Boston Globe,[2] The New York Times,[3] Poets & Writers Magazine,[4] and innumerable blogs, including that of Ron Silliman.
The ambiguous yet perceptible impact of the website on the poetry world was summed up in a blog entry at the Kenyon Review about a month after Foetry's closure: "If its death (if we dare call it that–might it, like King Arthur, lie in wait to rise again at a time of future need?)
"[5] Foetry.com's most successful campaign, both in terms of news coverage and action taken because of it, was against the Contemporary Poetry Series run by the University of Georgia Press, and against Jorie Graham in particular.
Acquiring documents through the Freedom of Information Act, Cordle and others discovered that Graham, as judge for the 1999 contest, had chosen Peter Sacks.
Bin Ramke, editor at the time of the Contemporary Poetry Series, resigned from his position as more and more national publicity turned the spotlight on the insider dealings at the University of Georgia Press and criticism mounted over his role in the controversy.
Another campaign, against the University of North Texas Press, resulted in the exasperation and subsequent resignation of Vassar Miller Prize founder and series editor, Scott Cairns.
The first is that the tone is "shrill," as University of Florida professor William Logan put it in the San Francisco Chronicle,[14] despite agreeing with the overall message and intent.
Related to shrillness of tone, critics of Foetry.com claim that there is a tendency to assume guilt until innocence is proven and that—with rare exceptions such as the CPS case mentioned above—Foetry.com authors did not insist on credible/tangible evidence.