Note: This was an April Fools' Day prank. Please see this topic for more information.

You may also view a tour of the prank by Clicking Here.

Hi Everyone.

On Friday afternoon, America’s Debate was served with a federal injunction requiring the redaction of certain materials contained on AmericasDebate.com. Jaime and I were both separately served with papers.

On Saturday morning, we had an emergency meeting with our attorney to discuss the injunction. The main focus of the meeting was to determine if it is legal, and if it is enforceable.

On Monday, our attorney will be filing a motion on our behalf to attempt to block the enforcement of this injunction. We strongly believe that we will prevail in having this motion granted due to jurisdiction conflicts. The original motion was filed in the 4th Circuit in Virginia, but America’s Debate, Inc. is located within the 11th district.

In the mean time, we have been advised that it is in our best interest to comply with the injunction, albeit on a (hopefully) temporary basis. As a result, you will obviously notice that we have been forced to redact certain information contained on the forum. Rest assured that we have full backups of this information, and are prepared to restore it as soon as our motion is granted.

Unfortunately, the injunction states that we are not permitted to discuss this in very much detail—we cannot name the agency that filed the injunction, we’re not allowed to state the reasons for the injunction beyond “national security reasons,” and we’re not even allowed to cite the section of the federal code under which the injunction was filed.

We should have more information on Monday about this unfortunate development and its impact on the future of .

Thank you for your patience, and if you have any questions, feel free to PM Jaime or me.

Thanks,

Mike

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your patience in this matter.

This is the fifth April Fools' Day for America's Debate, and we've never once played a prank on the site. We thought that this year would be a great time to give it a shot since it fell on a Sunday, usually a low traffic day for . Don't expect anything next year, since I'm not sure this can be topped.

Obviously, this is all fake. We were not served any papers, there is no injunction, and the redaction was meant only in good fun. Nothing was actually redacted; the supposed banned words were simply wrapped with a black background. All of the actual text was visible if you selected the text as if you were to do a cut and paste.

For the record, this is the list of the fifty-six extremely common words that were redacted throughout the entire forum:

america, army, ballot, battle, british, budget, bush, cheney, citizen, combat, commonwealth, conservative, constitution, debate, democracy, democrat, democratic, election, environment, equal, federal, freedom, gonzalez, government, guantanamo, homeland, honest, immunity, independent, intelligence, iran, iraq, justice, liberal, libertarian, liberty, marines, navy, news, president, private, protest, public, republic, republican, rove, rumfeld, sanction, security, sovereign, state, surveillance, terror, truth, united, vote

Since it would be difficult to leave the supposed "redactions" in place for one topic only, I'm going to go ahead and manually edit each post in the discussion topic to reflect how it appeared with the redactions in place. All other redactions throughout the rest of the forum will be automatically reversed, and everything will once again return to normal.

The responses we received-- in the discussion topic, via PM, via email, and via instant messenger-- ranged from shared laughter to anger to concern to disgust. We hope, now that it is all said and done, that we can all have a collective laugh at the one and only prank ever played on America's Debate.

From the Wikipedia's entry for April Fools' Day:



We hope everyone had a fun time with this, and that everyone had a great April Fools' Day!



Mike