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"For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever. These sites often get submitted to Digg and then are invariably buried after a certain amount of time." So claims an open letter posted to Valleywag yesterday. The mythical Digg auto-bury list is one of those Internet legends that everyone who's anyone knows about, but no one can produce. Several bloggers have published lists, but none of them have also published a reproducible methodology for determining that list. The score: Gossip 1, Scientific Method 0. Unless the four self-styled "most powerful users in the community" present their own list of banned sites — not one or two URLs, but "dozens" to quantify their claim, along with instructions for obtaining that list yourself — they're even worse rumormongers than we are.