To his point, Examiner.com has more pop-ups and tracking cookies than most sites I've seen. It is almost readable if you don't have a pop-up blocker turned off. Complaints about Examiner articles don't just happen here. I've seen the same complaints at forums on eGullet, Southern Living, HGTV, ParcBench and other sites. For example, I just went to Dallas DIY Mechanic on Examiner.com (just chose a random one so as to not seem like I am picking on the poor author of this article) and one article had at least 8 tracking cookies. Techrepublic a while back had an article in which they referred to Examiner as 'trojan territory'. Virus may be the wrong term but it the cookies and pop-ups make that site as annoying as hell... oh yea, and no matter how they shine it up, it is still a pay-per-click blog.
The big point though with some of these whiny bloggers is they simply don't respect the sites they post on. This isn't a FR thing. You can find complaints about bloggers 'pimping' all over the web. Every private site has the right to set standards for how they want things posted. FR has many, many, many bloggers who respect the site and don't hear a word from those who call out spammers. I only recall a handful of major zots for spamming- folks like Anthony Martin, Grant Swank, and Warner Hudson. All of them posted hundreds of articles with little or no interaction except attacking other members of the site who were critical of them (especially Hudson). I have a feeling the real zots came from how they treated other members, not for directly spamming.
Wow.
Abine found -8- trackers there.
[but “only” 14 cookies...possibly because I already have a slew of iffy companies permanently blocked, anyway]
Some blog I checked out the other day dumped a world-record _81 cookies_ on my machine.