Yes congratulations, you’ve discovered they’re using Substack. This was already addressed and not in dispute? . It doesn’t support your argument, because:

• Substack is not a blogging platform. It’s more like Wordpress in that it can host blogs, but doesn’t exclusively do so, and this website is clearly not a blog.

• This is the only reference to Substack on the entire website. And this footer isn’t what makes a website a “blog”. I’d wager that if you’d have blocked this footer using uBlock or something you wouldn’t be able to really tell it’s built on Substack.

• The links listed don’t lead to other accounts, instead they lead to static pages about Substack’s about page or their privacy policy.

• Dropsitenews is operating through their own domain via Squarespace.

• Dropsitenews has several independent journalists and editors working for them, and is a news organisation, not a random blog. Their own about page explains this pretty clearly, and other websites (including MBFC) agree with that.

• Their website does not look functionally different from a news website not built on Substack. The only “functional difference” (and I’m really stretching the definition of the word ‘functional’ here) is the footer you’ve linked that mentions Substack.

I have to reiterate here: nobody is asking you to pick-and-choose what Substack “accounts” to allow or not. I actually fully agree with you that doing that would be a bit of an undue burden, similar to not choosing which Twitter accounts to allow. But that’s just simply not how Dropsitenews or Substack work.

Listen, I’m trying to help you here to either clarify the rules or apply them more consistently. You’re getting a lot of flak now because you’re not applying the rule as written, but through an publicly unknown interpretation where anything built using Substack is (frankly inexplicably) also banned. If that’s how you want to moderate, fine, but clarify it in the rules.

Still, I have to recommend the tried and tested method of white/blacklisting (or allow/denylisting as it’s often called these days). If someone puts up a new post, check the list with Ctrl-F for the domain of the post. If it’s in the allowlist, allow the post, if it’s in the denylist, remove it. Dead simple, takes seconds to do. If it’s not listed, open the website and make a determination if it should be allowed. If so, add to the allowlist, otherwise add to the denylist and list the reason for denial. Takes a minute or so, maybe a couple minutes at worst. Put all this in a publicly viewable Google doc/sheet/whatever and link it in the sidebar. Total transparancy, dead simple to execute and basically impossible to argue against. If you want to put in even less effort, have posters submit why a domain should be allowlisted (you can put specific requirements there like a link to the MBFC rating or whatever) so you can just review the reasons and either allowlist or denylist the domain.

This still lets you blanket-ban Twitter/Facebook/Medium etc… for the stated reason, but helps avoid these issues where you are inconsistently applying the rules and banning a legitimate news organisation.

Lol, doesn’t address what they said at all

You bitched that they didn’t register their own domain, the other guy pointed out they did, and you just went back to going “but it’s substack!!!” When they’ve already destroyed your piss ass argument against the platform