We have started receiving comments that were impolite or relatively fact-free, and have deleted a few of them to maintain civility of conversation.
Polite Note
By George Phillies on June 8, 2025 8:56 AM
George Phillies
Polite Note
April 21, 2026
Your Premier Source on Third Parties and Independent Candidates Since 2008
We have started receiving comments that were impolite or relatively fact-free, and have deleted a few of them to maintain civility of conversation.
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There were multiple points made by various people there that weren’t made here. And only some of the readership is overlapping. But ok. One question answered. There are various other questions below, when you can.
X: Sorry for the delay. I was holding space for George in case he had more to add, either as a board member or part of the editorial team.
I want to say that I really appreciate when folks share links to relevant content from Ballot Access News that we may have missed. I’ve been a reader of Richard’s work since I was a student, and his platform is a valuable primary source. I hope this doesn’t discourage you or other readers from sharing particularly notable items in the future.
That said, after consulting with others on the management team here and with OMF directly, there’s less enthusiasm about sharing full links to discussions (or even large blocks of text) simply because there’s a parallel conversation happening elsewhere on a topic we’ve also covered here. If something new or newsworthy is introduced in a comment that adds to the conversation, I’d personally consider that appropriate. But otherwise, it can come across as overly promotional, especially given that both platforms likely have overlapping readerships who already follow the comment threads on both sites. If this ever changes in the future, I will make a public note it in the Monthly Open Thread.
Having received no further responses from management, if Unknown’s interpretation of the guidance we did receive is correct, is it then in order to post the link to the ballot access news discussion where it was previously posted again? If not, why not?
I apologize if I misunderstood.
Friends, I think you may have misunderstood. The reply was that the actual problem was not linking back to ballot access news. To me that implies that the actual problem was something else, and that ballot access news links are still allowed, although I may be the one who misunderstood.
That still leaves the question of what the actual problem was or is.
I know that the comment from my friend X that was removed didn’t say anything except that readers of an article on the same exact topic at IPR might find a parallel discussion at BAN to be interesting, that he or she thinks many people in that discussion made various good points, and provided a link to that discussion.
That wasn’t allowed, and neither was a comment asking whether copy and paste from that discussion would be allowed instead posted afterwards by X in that discussion, although for the time being that same question does remain posted but unanswered in this one.
There are of course the many other remaining questions here, and hopefully management will eventually answer them. I hope everyone remains patient and remembers that they are busy folks and can’t always answer the same day or week.
Jordan, are you able to answer the remaining questions here if George Phillies doesn’t have time to do it? Is there anyone else besides the two of you who might be able to look at the questions and answer them?
Ballot Access News was used as a source in articles here as recently as far back as May 20, 2008, the first day IPR went up and as recently as May 20, 2025, and in comments as recently as May 21 this year. I missed any prior announcement that links to Ballot Access News are no longer allowed. Is there a list of other sites which are not allowed to be linked in comments?
Unrelated, I’m getting a notice on some articles on this site, but not others, that I’m not allowed to view this site. Is anyone else getting the same thing?
There were additional questions based on that…please see below. There were also other questions unrelated to Ballot Access News or anything posted there which are also below.
The actual problem is not linking back to Ballot Access News.
If links to Ballot Access News discussions are in fact no longer allowed here, what about copy and paste of particular comments from those discussions? That seems cumbersome, especially when it’s a bunch of different comments by different people, some of them long. But regardless of how cumbersome it is, does it violate this site’s current standards as well?
Linking the whole discussion seems much less onerous, but I’ll grant that the discussion there does contain a bunch of comments that unambiguously don’t rise to this site’s comment standards. What about the comments there that contain good points that are relevant to parallel discussions here but might also contain various phrasing or extraneous comments within them, can they be quoted in full or do they have to be reworded and excise-quoted also?
Is it impolite to quote someone else’s comments at another site since they contain points relevant to discussion at this one, but not post a link back to the original source comments because links to that site are no longer allowed, if in fact that’s the case?
If it was my comments from here or anywhere which someone else quoted elsewhere than where they are initially posted, I would personally prefer if anyone doing so would link back to wherever I said whatever it was, so that it could be read in context. Do others here feel the same way about whatever comments they post?
I read the current site rules but don’t remember seeing anything about not allowing criticism of minor parties. Is it in fact against current site policies to predict that a given minor party effort will fail, or to even ask why that comment was removed?
If I recall correctly, the initial comment was too short to have been impolite. Was it because that person who made it didn’t take the additional time to explain why he thought so, rendering the prediction fact free, even though he’s someone with the background to make such predictions based on a lot of experience?
As for my comments asking why that comment and a few others were removed, which were then also removed, I apologize if anything I said was impolite. None of it was intended to be. I’m just trying to understand better what is allowed and what isn’t, what rules the removed comments broke, or what was impolite or fact free about them, and that now also extends to my questions about it which were also removed.
I notice that while my answer to Rick below is still up at least for now, Rick’s initial question is gone. Maybe I’m not remembering something but all I remember him asking was what the actual discussion policies were.
Is it considered impolite to even ask? I know there was a post about that here not very long ago, but not everyone reading necessarily keeps up with the site all the time.
More things I don’t understand about how the policies are being applied. Comments which were initially not removed but did get removed later in the course of this afternoon included asking why someone else’s comment that was merely a prediction that a certain new minor party effort in one state would fail was removed. That person is a long time commenter here who spent many years working to build minor parties all over the country, particularly but not only in terms of ballot access.
Another commenter didn’t say anything except that his or her comments that were not approved were not impolite or fact free. He or she did also say that he or she is from the state that the article was about and had spent many years working on building minor parties there. That was subsequently removed also. I don’t know if the initial comment that wasn’t approved was impolite or fact free, but what was impolite or fact free about this follow-up?
On another thread I asked before this one was posted about whether or why Ballot Access News links are suddenly not allowed after 17 years when the sites have been frequent news sources for each other, and pointed out that my remaining comment there was an addendum to a subsequently removed comment.
So naturally that comment was now removed also. Not the orphan comment itself, but the one pointing all this out. Let’s see about this one. What’s impolite or fact free about any of those?
On the other hand, ballot access news has a lot of good comments expressing opinions that seem to not be allowed here at all, or perhaps people don’t want to participate where they risk having comments removed.
Whatever type of democracy Mr. Belcher is big on must not be big on free speech for all. Imagine speech everywhere being this regulated. Of course, private sites can do what they want, but I’m one of many people who finds the ones with the most unencumbered free expression to be the most useful.
In fact, the discussion I linked to there and had the link removed was a good example. A lot of good points were brought up in the discussion which haven’t been brought up in the parallel discussion here, and now it seems can’t even be linked to from here for those who might find them useful or interesting. I don’t know when or why it became against the rules here to even link to BAN threads – some time after May 21, apparently..
Even if the approach here is good in principle, it’s completely not good in the particular applications this time. I can’t make heads or tails of why the comments I saw removed, including mine, are in any way worse than what does get posted or what rule they broke or what about them was impolite. Nothing at all that would give me any kind of guidance of what to do or not do in the future.
Good. Ballot Access News’s hands-off approach turned their comments section into an anti-democratic bad-faith slopfest. You don’t want that.
@ Rick
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/comment-policy/
I wonder which portion of these policies linking to Ballot Access News might violate.
As of May 21 and maybe later links to Ballot Access News were still allowed here. I guess now they’re not?