In the thread Randy references I wouldn’t pay much attention to what the person claims yahoo said to him. Sounds like a person minimizing their link farming. Link farms have always been a no-no with search engines.
When it comes to affiliates, I think people need to read comments and actions reasonably rather than outlandishly. Yahoo seems to want to have a policy against boiler plate affiliates, meaning sites that are basically copies of many other sites without any original content. I doubt many people would object to downgrading/removing mirrors, or also the next step up (virtual duplicate database sites). You search for “red radios” you don’t want thirty sites with the exact same database content to appear on different URLs, with the only difference the affiliate tag.
Affiliate sites simply need original content. Your red radio page just needs to say some darn thing about red radios that isn’t said a zillion other places.
(None of this addresses what may be effecting arkyt in his thread.)