Is it true that Yahoo Answers will no longer post questions or answers containing the phrase...?

Yes and no.

They have always had some anti-spam filters. Recently it seems they have added a lot of refinements to them. One main thing is, if a website name keeps getting posted a lot, they will assume it is spam and it goes into the filter.

Amazon has been badly spammed by 1000's of spammers lately, so it might now be barred. These were all "affiliates", shops that share advertising and sales procedures with Amazon but might have their own products as well. While spamming is against Amazon's own rules, too, there's really not much they can do about it.

So if a legit user now wants to suggest Amazon as a good place to get something, they have to just say "look on Amazon" because they can't put the link to the product. The spammers have gone and ruined it for everybody.

I have heard of people getting 999 error also from trying to post questions with imageshack or tinypic links in them, too. These are usually not spam, but automated systems don't care, they just go on how often something's been posted. No great loss, most of these image links are part of "am I pretty?" or "what race do I look?" silly questions, anyway.

Huh, well how about that.

I tried to post the *FORBIDDEN WORDS* and got:

Sorry, Unable to process request at this time -- error 999.

You can say Amazon but not Amazon dot com.

ʎəɿʞɹɐq  ̊ ͜͡● ̊

I haven't heard of anything.....