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@fauxlaw
with the only proviso being that Congress must be notified within 48 hours of the strike and its objective. Trump abided by that law. =Congressional leaders were notified within the hour of the attack last Saturday. Obligation met.
It’s empty virtue signaling at this point… That or they’ll argue they played ostrich for those 48 hours.
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@Lunatic
just sheeped the ultra vote,
Nice straw man
…
Why do you believe Ultra and his justification? Moreover, if you believe that he’s telling the truth and I am scum, why are you opposed to having me die by hammering him?
Joan of Arc isn’t knowing for getting revenge on those who killed her. Nor has he given a more detailed justification even when pressured… If by some chance he’s town, he’ll be an easy mislynch in later day phases thereby helping scum at a critical time, so why do you want that to occur?
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@21Pilots
Shouldn’t there be a punishment for users who forfeit without a valid reason?
I assume this is related to the new voting system proposal…
I agree many things should be penalized. A mature voter can factor those into the mitigation factor when voting in their favor. The majority of voters will be instantly biased against them for forfeitures, making winning any points an uphill battle. And a really immature voter will no longer be able to award extra points for their amazing conduct while forfeiting (rare but it’s happened).
A related suggestion I’ve made elsewhere, is to have the site itself penalize forfeitures automatically. I envision this as a minor deduction (maybe 0.25 points per forfeiture?), which voters may easily outweigh with their votes should they deem the arguments better in spite of that… Actually, that too should be a proposal (no guarantee the dev team can make all things we agree on happen, but getting site agreement on directions to push should be helpful to them).
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@David
There is one more thing I want to add to this MEEP: Should debates that are full forfeited on all sides be deleted?
Seems like an issue unworthy of a site vote..
They are needless bloat. Like the dictionary hidden in DDO to inflate the page count to make the site look big. If not getting rid of them, we might as well start not getting rid of spam threads.
P.S. I do get rid of them when I see them.
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@Ultracrepidarian
Barney are you just gonna sit there and take that? You're getting absolutely roasted!!
RM wants to see the milk, so I'm trying... It's much more comfortable sitting down.
That said, trying to deflect players onto each other for a mindless fight doesn't serve town; and I don't believe your claim (Joan of Arc didn't blow up and take her killers with her, that would be Agnes Nutter from Good Omens).
VTL Ultracrepidarian, and yes, I'll gladly pivot to lay down the hammer.
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@Lunatic
Manages to think he’s right when he’s 100% wrong every single game.
He is great at analysis. If anyone can decode a theme, it's going to be him. His weakness is is the ego makes people not want to team up with him.
I was just playing a Robocop videogame, and at one point you're asked to endorse who should be mayor; I was so hated that I threw the election against the guy I endorsed via endorsing him.
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@whiteflame
Thank you, once I'm done being milked, you'll get the first cup!
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@AdaptableRatman
But I am cursed with literacy. It's a terrible disability to have in this day and age.
I'm not for or against lynching either of us, but I am not a noob who gives in to that type of pressure.
I'm not for or against lynching either of us, but I am not a noob who gives in to that type of pressure.
Also... What kind of threat was that, and what would the CoC say about it? (sorry if other people have already made that joke this game)
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Reading everything now... Assuming there's enough rum.
Has anyone started a dashboard or given read lists I should zero in on?
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@whiteflame
You hopped on a couple of hours ago, said you were getting caught up, and then never posted again.
A friend invited me out to lunch, and now we’re attending a Thai festival.
That said, I can’t imagine what information has come out in DP1 to merit 10 pages and counting… So my catchup will inevitably end up being a bit like Swiss Cheese.
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@David
Proposition 4: New features
I recently did another thread to brainstorm voting mechanics refinements (separate from enforcement policy refinements). The results of it may be found here: https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/12859/posts/526041
A few highlights I think would be most worth pursuing:
- Set the defaults to Rated and Winner Selection... Actually, let’s just set logical defaults for everything on the debate creation page: Rated, Pro, either 2 or 3 rounds (and remove the option of 1; since that ain’t a debate), and Open voting.
- Add a new voting system which allows mitigation but does not allow the possibility of fluffing unearned extra points into the chosen winner.
- Refine or remove the categorical voting system.
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@ILikePie5
@Casey_Risk
/in
I’ll probably be the woman too informationally lazy to identify as a feminist.
Just hope I’m not a man who identifies as a feminist to get away with sexual harassment
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@21Pilots
How about DebateCraft?
Simple and brilliant!
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@LucyStarfire
History is allowed to be discussedNo, it isnt.
Excellent point, we shall have to ban every user who has used the history forum, the word history itself, or indeed wrote anything in the past tense.
🤪
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@David
Proposition 1: New moderators
FYI, until you’ve got full ownership powers to enable the moderator menus for whomever, my account remains ready for any new admin(s) to utilize.
———
Proposition 2: Rebranding the site
I tried to get us the URL debate.org, but GoDaddy is running a couple little scams which it’s caught up in, so that one’s hopeless.
I am not a fan of Debateart as a name (note the wiki is DAT not DART) as it implies we’re debating art. Something straight forward like Formal Debate Addicts would seem a better fit. I wonder if there’s .debate URLs yet, if so that opens tons of solid options.
Also the visual design needs more cowbell.
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@AdaptableRatman
@LucyStarfire
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Ideas so far:
- Switch wholly to single category voting (currently available as opt in)
- Make single category voting the default
- Add the ability to vote on the quality of votes (I think the notion has a lot of merit, but could prove too complicated to code (at least for awhile))
- Weighted votes by length
- Add non-scoring categories (basically survey questions)
- Add a low value style category
- Allow debaters to disable voting (so rated, unrated, and no voting… this can currently be simulated using a judge instructed to leave it a tie)
Apologies if I overlooked any.
I couple thoughts I have:
- If multi-category voting remains an option, it ought to value arguments far more than anything else. Even well intended people sometimes convert what would be good votes into vote bombs instinctively trying to out score votes for the other side (the competition is supposed to be between the debaters, not the voters). I’d like arguments to be worth at least as much as everything else combined (including any additional categories this process may suggest adding).
- Also for if the current categories one stays mostly in place, I’d like to invert the penalty categories. Someone trying to use their vote as a valentines card by blinding giving everything to them, would inadvertently assign them categories which have negative points (misconduct and illegibility).
- “Tie” should be renamed tied/ungraded (there’s been complaints stemming from the current wording)
- Tied should not assign points.
- Allow moderators to modify votes (to include whatever adjustments after the debate has ended… even if we have to manually estimate ELO corrections with it)
- I think the voting system I’d like most would be a single-category+ system. The plus for more advanced, like New Game+. I envision this as simply giving voters control over the weight of their own vote if they so choose. The default weight is 100%, but they may decide to lower it (but obviously not to raise it).
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@Lemming
Personally, I always 'enjoyed (From debate.org)Who did you agree with before the debate?Who did you agree with after the debate?
I also liked them. When I served on the controversial vote review board, some votes tried to game the system with those which was sometimes used to prove the need for removal.
I suppose one could argue adding one point for style, In current debates.
Not to say going from 7 points to 8 is bad, but do you believe that to be ideally worth 0.33 of arguments, or would a different percentage be more suitable?
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@thett3
But innomen won by a single point because all of his voters gave him 7 points while most of blue steels voters only gave him the 3 points for arguments.
Why were those votes not moderated?
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@jonrohith
Any other ways you wish to tell me you haven’t read the voting policy, without saying you haven’t read the voting policy?
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@AdaptableRatman
Thank you. Any thoughts on changes you’d like to see in the direct mechanics of point allotments?
tabula rasa … final round blitzkrieg
But what if con hasn’t proven that cheating is bad, then shouldn’t pro win extra points for citing someone cheated and it asserting that it was a crime that they were not rewarded for it? (Note for everyone else: this was a key issue in a recent debate)
I’m not against people using Tabla Rasa, or near enough to it, in their votes… But the goal of that paradigm is to minimize bias, and It is not the only way to achieve that. As an example, my votes often give feedback (such as the person I’m voting for is wrong because of X reason which the other side failed to address) which is not part of the scoring.
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@Double_R
Don’t forget that evil Australian woman who wasn’t a virgin!
While the full body cavity search (which was mandated by the lack of breaking any laws) didn’t find anything, you can never be too careful.
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Date: 6/17/2025
Moderator: Joint Decision
RemyBrown has been banned for 30 days, for a number of reasons. He has publicly stated that there were special circumstances in his life which contributed to at least one of these temporary lapses of judgement. With that in mind, the ban is not longer. This length of separation from this website will always give him a chance to square away anything in his life before posting here again.
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@AdaptableRatman
I would particularly love to see your feedback on this... Largely because I suspect you already ran a 10,000 debate simulations on different options.
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We've been locked into the current voting system a long time. In fact it was copied from another site, without real refinements.
With recent developments, I believe we will have an opportunity to fix details.
The current system, up to 7 points per vote, weirdly given to both sides if left tied:
- 3 for arguments
- 2 for sources
- 1 for legibility
- 1 for conduct
Suffice to say, I don't think this is optimal. Granted, the optimal would vary based on the number of votes any debate receives, but I think our basic setup could do a lot better. For example, we could have 1 point for arguments, and fractional points for the other categories (or 10 for arguments, and numbers less than 10 for other stuff; or 100 for arguments, anything is possible); we could change legibility to illegibility and have it apply a direct negative (actually, this would probably help against particularly lazy vote bombers).
We could have different categories, different values, no values on some of them (proved to be a bit of a waste on DDO, but it was nice feedback), again maybe direct negatives... What would you all like to see?
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@fauxlaw
You're in the Debate Dev Team discord. While I do see benefits to posting here, gathering feedback, etc., I'd post your distilled ideas into discord.
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@21Pilots
Been through some rough times… Medication and therapy have kept me alive.
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@Sir.Lancelot
At this point it feels like you're complaining that we picked the wrong guy, so should remove him from the team, and admit to the error.
I and other mods have admitted we picked the wrong guy, he was removed from the team, and I have admitted it was an error; further I have taken personal responsibility for said error.
Like if you were a cop, you'd be demanding I pull over again after I've already pulled over: https://youtu.be/N2q62lymKLI?si=iOB0iV-tlU5c7SCq&t=115
You specifically claimed my posts in this thread have given mixed signals:
Full clarification would help avoid unnecessary confusion. You're sending mixed signals here.
All of my recent posts can easily be skimmed at: https://www.debateart.com/members/Barney/forum-posts
To which, you're welcome to point to which of them gave you mixed signals. Suffice to say, I both disagree with the assessment, but still sought to clarify matters in my most recent post here.
...
Once more, the egg is on my face. With zero reservations I admit this.
Any future requests for me to admit this some more, I'll just be providing a link back to this post (assuming I respond at all).
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@Sir.Lancelot
I do find myself wondering. What were your feelings that led you to promote Adaptable, and what are your feelings after?
As long as I can remember, he has deeply wanted to be a moderator, and has repeatedly petitioned for this. He is probably more dedicated to this site than every other member put together. I have long desired to be able to pass the reigns to him, and had been suggesting that before he went away last time. While he and I fight plenty, and would not be surprised if he banned me first thing, I genuinely believe he wants what's best for the site (and yup, if that included a ban on me, so be it). I can both have issues with someone, and still respect them and wish good things upon them.
Adding to that, consider for a moment how long the active moderation team has just been whiteflame and I. Personally, I do not enjoy being a moderator; I do it to aid the community, and help prevent it from going the way of DDO. I strongly suspect it is the same for whiteflame. Right now it is pretty easy to look at this thread and be like: David's back, and he's in talks in Michael to take control of the site! But at the time, moderation was whiteflame and I, with increasingly rare guest appearances in the moderator chat. Plus, we are the first to hear about features gradually breaking, but lack sufficient authorizations to do anything about it.
Getting someone passionate about the site at the helm, to me is the best hope for the site... There was the risk of him being too passionate, but I believed the most likely rewards outweighed the most likely risks. This didn't work out, but I'll take a misstep over stagnation; even if it proved to be an embarrassing misstep for me.
I did not treat it as a joke. I literally manually deleted every conversation in my PMs to prepare this account for a new user. We also put the work into making a new and better organized discord server to replace the old one.
But yes, it did not work out. First there was a couple red flags, which made me second-guess the idea, and then there was a thread announcement which to me read as if he was going to ban all mafia players from this site (or at least any who mention lynching people). There had been no talks with the team leading up to this, just a massive power trip out of nowhere. That's when I gave up on the idea.
On one hand, it was your idea to make him a mod, but you chose to gatekeep certain perms, and the official title. Denying him even access to the chats.Implying you don't fully trust him.
I think it was David who suggested a phase in period when he came back of a title (which if we haven't used before, we should use in the future). But I would not call anything gatekeeping. We were merely not rushing everything on the first day as if it was a timed Olympic event. The moderation credentials had to go through an existing account because of Michael's absence, and it made logistical sense to give people a warning before ownership of my account was switched over. He was invited into the moderation discord chat, merely not the archive.
He has a thing about avatars, much like I have a thing about voting standards. While I don't understand his thing about avatars, I accept that most people don't understand why I'm so uptight about votes.
If chilling out and talking over proposed changes with rest of the team, most changes are easily workable, and could be accepted by the community if better presented.
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@Sir.Lancelot
What are your strongest beliefs currently?
Right now LA is on my mind...
I think masked protesters waving flags from other countries, ought to leave the USA (or you know, at least switch it to USA flags...). The rioters should of course be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Protesters who aid rioters should be punished as well (but to a lesser extent... Like when rioters tried an insurrection, I firmly believe their ringleaders should have been hanged, but people just swept up in the momentum who would otherwise not try to murder our elected leaders could be let off with just some outrageous amount of community service).
At the same time, I think all police involved in the unprovoked attacks on journalists ought to be sent to prison or mental institutions both for weapons crimes and for impersonating law enforcement (ok, that last bit is going into hyperbole), and those surrounding them along with their immediate superiors fired for failing to be police officers when they decided not to intervene against those deranged criminals. Further, the top level leadership which has allowed this to continue, should likewise suffer one or both penalties (given the history of this and lack of reform, it seems like they encouraged it).
Or areas of expertise you pride yourself on?
Really, the best from me is my unconventional analytical instincts. I see waste, and I try to fix it. Like you know those stupid questions on the payment devices at grocery stores? On the aggregate, those cost roughly 7 lives per day per stupid question, and that's just in the USA. When I was a combat medic, I massively improved the training standards, such that even while I was punished at the time, every medic which came to my unit after me had been taught to the standards I proposed.
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@AdaptableRatman
Case in point... That said, you are correct that it is not the only problem; which was not my intent to imply, but I can see how it could be fairly taken that way. I ought to have specified a major problem, instead of the problem.
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@jonrohith
There is no election for moderator positions, but we are openminded to feedback. The site used to have an elected position, but that turned out badly. That said, for some things we do hold referendums; since we're here to serve the community not rule it.
You've likely seen moderation get behind, and that is with a much better ratio than 1 to 100. The problem is this is a debate site, so active users like to argue.
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@Sir.Lancelot
I’d say Savant is better than me. Not to say I don’t have my moments, but the absolute best thing about my debates is my dedication to entertaining the audience; which is very nice and all, but doesn’t make me right or more logical (in fact, it has turned into unintended red herrings).
And damnit, now I am curious how many times I argued the anti-abortion side, if I did… One of my fundamental pieces of advice is to argue against your own beliefs to grow!
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@ADreamOfLiberty
I saw that one too! So true, like communism, the most absolute perfect system ever… Except for the whole No True Communism fallacy which needs to be applied every single time.
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@Greyparrot
I’m genuinely reminded of when I did a survey on 4th trimester abortions, being crystal clear it was speaking of hunting down lame adults for an ultra late-term abortion…
A few people did get that it was a joke, but so many people wanted to be fooled.
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@21Pilots
So what are some characteristics, or skills that a MOD should have?
IMO the most important two things IMO are a love for the site/community, and thick skin.
Something I should clarify for everyone is that the moderation team is actually quite chill. We have a discord server for logging and discussing any problems we consider worth writing down (some weeks I might ban a dozen spam bots, none of them get mentioned), but it's pretty informal. There's not even any real hierarchy inside it, no required uniforms, and certainly no secret meetings under the blood moon in which we engage in animal sacrifices to hasten the arrival of... I mean, yeah, we just hang out, share the occasional meme, and certainly do not summon any eldritch gods.
That said, even with recent issues, I still believe the moderation team could use some fresh blood.
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@LucyStarfire
Also, make me a moderator so I can enforce the true religion of Meowbahh here.
Meow has declared the religion to be Meowism, not simply their name, so automatic 6 month ban for sacrilege/catgenderriledge.
/joke
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@ADreamOfLiberty
I can't understand how you could see him as mentally well enough to do that.
I don’t believe him to be mentally unwell.
There is plenty he and so disagree on, but I don’t care about the wellbeing of this site even a quarter as much as he does.
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@AdaptableRatman
I am meant to be a mod. He treats me like I am not at all a mod and this is because David and Barney wanted me promoted, not him.
Small clarification: I wanted you as a mod, whiteflame supported that, and David coincidentally returned.
The timing of David’s return was AFAIK not connected.
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@AdaptableRatman
I asked on DM, now I ask here, can I post to threads the other makes, if I do not directly address the user?
It’s ok so long as it’s to engage with the topic, and not the user. Of course even then it should be handled with care (no baiting them, etc.)
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My opinion on this is oddly controversial…
We (men) lost when so many of us behaved so badly that the bear even seems like an option.
We (men) lost when so many of us behaved so badly that the bear even seems like an option.
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@AdaptableRatman
A big thing is the moderation team has mellowed out with time. I disagree with a lot of statements people make, but that doesn't mean they all need to be banned.
For one thing, every time we can someone (save for the bots), justifying it takes a lot of work. This isn't a fault in the system, but a feature. Last week I suggested banning someone because some of their behavior pissed me off, but another moderator started asking the logical questions about how long said behavior had been going on... That let me rethink it, and I was honestly in the wrong to jump to suggesting a ban. Sure, what they were doing to another member was childish, but it was such a short timespan that it was premature to consider banning them.
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While I'm not going to rush to update all prior pages, I have changed the use of symbols in the argument page template. They're now more intuitive to other (but less intuitive to me). https://debate.miraheze.org/wiki/Template:Argument
Before it was ➕ for whomever initiates a contention, and ➖ for attacks against it.
Now is is ➕ for pro, ➖ for con.
Hopefully this will lead to an easier time with edit.
On wiki pages, it'll display something like this (and vice versa for con):
➕ Pro Argument Title: Statement supporting the affirmative.Supporting claim or explanation.➖ Con Rebuttal Title: Response challenging the above.Reasoned counterpoint or evidence.➕ Pro Defense Title: Counter-response to preserve the original.Further clarification or justification.➖ Con Second Rebuttal Title: Continuing challenge.Elaboration or deepened criticism.
Or in code form (each : at the start of al ine marks an indent):
:➖ '''Con Argument Title''': Statement supporting the negative.
:: Supporting claim or explanation.
::➕ '''Pro Rebuttal Title''': Response challenging the above.
::: Reasoned counterpoint or evidence.
:::➖ '''Con Defense Title''': Counter-response to preserve the original.
:::: Further clarification or justification.
::::➕ '''Pro Second Rebuttal Title''': Continuing challenge.
:::: Elaboration or deepened criticism.
...
Aside from that, there is a matter I could use a little feedback on... Not sure the best way to phrase this, but should the wiki discourage good arguments from bad application of social sciences via leaps of faith in the data? E.g., in a presidential debate, Hilary Clinton argued X (for the sake of argument, that any baby born under the full moon would be a werewolf, and thus must be aborted in the 4th trimester), but 28.55% of citizens still voted for her. Should pages making arguments on topics related to X, assume those 28.55% of Americans believe X just because they voted for a candidate running on said platform?
I'm conflicted on this because I'm a data scientist. It's unconventional to assume people vote for things they believe in, and even if they do, there's such problems as single issue voters, and of course the need to pick the on balance lesser of two evils. Yet, the outcome is still pretty compelling, and leads to great argument soundbites: 30% of Missouri voters agree that it's not rape if you get her pregnant! (yeah, actual thing... A candidate running on an anti-abortion platform proclaimed that, and people still voted for him... That's less scary when you consider only like half of the eligible voters voted, so like 15% of them... but that's still 15% of a state should shouldn't be allowed to breath the same oxygen as human beings).
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I am going to be pretty busy the next few days. I could fill in if really needed, but I'd be dead weight until probably DP3 (depending on how long they last). So I mean, if you need someone just to sit around and get lynched, sure, but otherwise it's probably best to keep waiting.
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@Savant
Without a doubt I've done that exact fallacy.
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