Sometimes when all the political hype gets me down, it lifts my spirits to see a small glimmer of humor. Wading through the trenches of hurtful comments yesterday, I found myself laughing with glee. Why you ask? Oh simply because the comment "I like fried spam!" had been reported as spam.

Tomorrow the political frenzy culminates with the midterm elections. Follow the nail biting conclusion to all the mudslinging here: http://www.netscape.com/tag/election+2006/

You may have noticed that the Sex Channel no longer appears in the list of channels in the right hand column on Netscape and that Sex is no longer an option when submitting stories to Netscape. When we first relaunched Netscape back in July, our hopes were that the Sex Channel would be a place where we could discuss issues pertaining to sex and sexuality in the 21st century's ever-shrinking world.

We were naive.

Unfortunately, the Sex Channel became a never-ending nexus of spam and porn. So we've killed the channel entirely, and very soon all the old stories that were submitted to the Sex Channel will disappear and any links out on Google or elsewhere that point you to them will direct you to a page explaining this tale of dreams shattered and innocence lost. Then you'll have a link to the homepage of Netscape where you can find lots of less spammy and less porn-plagued content.

Besides the inevitable spam and ad-heavy spammish blogs that hide their content under 500 pixels of advertisements, besides the duplicate stories that are rehashed versions of the same story or even the same exact AP story syndicated across numerous local publications that are submitted and resubmitted to Netscape, and besides all the blogs out there breaking the middle-man rule, submitting stories that they've nearly quoted entirely from another source as their own--besides all these things that try to drown and weigh down Netscape, my least favorite type of submission is scraped content.

We just banned http://resanium.com from Netscape because one of our content-partners, Autoblog, found that an entire post from Autoblog had been scraped, reposted to this site, and the reposted link had been submitted to Netscape.

I just wanted to drop a line here and let everyone know that we do not want content stolen from elsewhere posted to Netscape as if it were your own. Your site will be banned for such behavior. In fact, I'm tempted to start publicly blogging a shame list, detailing all the people who we do ban for this reason. The Internet community as a whole needs to start taking a stand against these types of bottom-feeding sites that are cluttering up our search results, our social news systems, and our Internet. Please let us know if there is anything you think we could be doing to better combat this problem.