Anyone Ever Had to Get Ezine to Whitelist Their Links?

I suspect it's more likely that a decision was made by a rookie editor (they're taking on staff all the time) and then overruled by someone else.

It's also true, though, that both their editorial guidelines and some of their unwritten (or less clearly written) policies have changed a few times, over recent years. They do explain on their blog that some sites deemed acceptable as resource-box links in the past wouldn't necessarily still be acceptable now. I'm not suggesting that that's what's happened in this instance - just clarifying it for anyone else reading whose experience might be different.

Last year, when I wrote and submitted articles on behalf of some clients, I did get a few rejected on grounds purely to do with the clients' sites linked-to in their resource-boxes ("insufficiently informative content for our readers" or something - as I remember one was a link to a squeeze-page!), which had certainly not happened to me during the previous year.

Policies do change there, and even some of the current polices aren't quite uniformly applied, as you'd expect from a company that size.