DebateArt.com

Hi folks,

As you might have noticed, I am barely available these days due to some challenges in life and I figured that it's probably time to move the ownership of the website to somebody else, that is, to try to sell it or donate it. I still need to do some research on how difficult it's going to be to transfer everything, because frankly I've never done anything like that, but that shouldn't take too much time. Anyway, if anyone is interested, please DM me.

When it comes to the tech stack:

It's almost a fully server rendered site implemented with Elixir/Phoenix. For those familiar with Ruby or Python, it shouldn't be too hard to grasp.

The front-end is mostly jQuery, coz for such a simple interface, it made no sense to bring up heavy artillery like React. Although the chat is implemented with VueJS, due to its highly interactive nature. I can provide more details in DM if interested.

Hi folks,

There have been a lot of ideas about features for debates and I'd like to have them all in one place. So if you have any ideas or suggestions, please voice them here.

My current ideas:

That's just to get started, what else do we have?

While I am working on the debates listing page, I am wondering if maybe somebody has some ideas or suggestions what you would like to see there?

Hi guys, so I have released a new sign up page that is supposed to look good both on desktops and mobiles, so I'd really appreciate if you could take a look at it from your device and see if everything is okay because I could test it only on so many devices :/ And of course, let me know what you think :) In the meantime, I will quickly replace the other authentication related pages.

Hi folks, just wanted to let you know that I've been burnout in the last months so the progress basically stopped but I am gonna try to get back on track with DART. Anyway, my current idea is to start drastically changing the parts of the website to make it more modern and interesting, it's time to leave DDO's shadow and move forward. I will try to make the website more modern*** and accessible for text readers and mobile devices, and what's more important, replace the core functionality with something more advanced and entertaining, which is something I will need your help with :)

I already have some drafts of the new design so you can check it out here: 

I remember somebody mentioned that we need to have a way to save drafts for debate arguments and recently I discovered that we already kinda have it. Why kinda? Well, how it works now is that if you create a new debate argument and go to its preview, the text of the argument will be saved, so if you close the tab on the preview and start the process from the beginning, your text will be there when you open the form for the new argument. The gotcha here is that it saves the text only for the specific argument, i.e. the text gets deleted if the argument gets forfeited. 

Hi there, I was wondering if you guys have some suggestions regarding additional information that you'd like to see on the debates' pages? And also maybe some new indicators or anything like it for the debates on the debates list page?

Most likely as a supporting program it's going to be useless but at least the browser itself is really nice, I highly recommend :)

I believe somewhere someone suggested this idea that if debate is full forfeit or mostly forfeit, the system should completely skip the voting part and just finish the debate without any rating change. At least that's how I remember/understood that part, so I just wanted to bring this up again and decide if I should implement something like and how it should be done. Any ideas or suggestions?

I am just wondering what you guys think about the new main page? It's still not finished and I have a few ideas how to extend and make better looking but still...

I am thinking about implementing a feature that would add some subtle indicators to the forum topics showing whether they have some new replies after your last visit.

Do you guys think it would be handy?

Hi guys!

I wanted to ask your opinion on the winning percentage calculation. So now, I use a possibly naive approach when I simply calculate by the formula:

And @omar2345 made a notice about it in the platform development, suggesting that we exclude the tied debates from the calculation and I guess that's one way to go.

The other way to go is to use the formula from here, where the ties are considered as 0.5 of a win.

To provide some examples, imagine two participants that had 5 debates against each other where 2 debates are won by the first participant and the rest are a tie.

Now, the winning percentages would be like this, respectively:

1) Current approach -> 40% and 0%

2) Omar's approach -> 100% and 0%

3) Wiki's approach ->  70% and 30%

So what do you think?

My personal view is that the Wiki's approach makes sense and is better than what we have now, but maybe there even better alternatives.

All the platform's changes and improvements are now available on our official HeadWayApp page.

So I have this idea of implementing the concept of "professional" debates, in which case only chosen users become "professionals" and can participate in the "professional" debates against other "professional" users and only with "professional" voters and so on. Also I am thinking about canceling the ratings for the general debates and make it "professional" debates specific thing. This way general debates will be used for proving to have the skill and deserving to be "professional" or for general rap battles and silly debates and whatnot. It's a super raw idea but I wonder what you guys think about it?

I believe I brought something up like this before but this time I am thinking about putting my hands on it and actually start working on it.

So, as somebody mentioned in another topic, we don't have a lot of people here and apparently it gets boring.

Well, I guess that's about right, at least to some extent, and we gotta do something about it and I need your help because it's rather time consuming to do everything on my own.

Since we don't have many cool features here, at least yet, we should try to attract mostly folks that are interested in online debating.

There are a lot of Facebook groups that are dedicated to debating and some of them have up to 20k people, believe me or not, so we should try to get at least some of them here. I didn't have a lot of time for it yet but I contacted a few admins of those groups but they haven't replied yet. So if you are a member of such group or just would like to help, please, try to contact any of those people and let them know that we exist and maybe even show them some of the debates that we have here, because we do have some really good debates here after all and they may be interested.

Apart from Facebook, I believe there are Reddit debating sub forums with lots of people, so that's where we could also try to find people that would like it here. And the list doesn't end here, there are other forums, websites and stuff like that so if you are willing to help, that'd be highly appreciated by everyone here :)

In my turn, I will finish some refactoring and get to implementing something new that could also attract some new blood here, but I am not yet sure what exactly it would be.

Thank you!

In a forum topic that I recently created asking about new sections on the website, somebody mentioned that a lot of people like the mafia game and it deserves to be something special, so now I am thinking about making it a first class citizen on our website, the only problem is, I know nothing about the game lol

I believe some people suggested a few ideas on what it would be interesting to have here, among those things were the big issues, polls and opinions, obviously the same stuff that DDO has. So answering the possible questions: we won't have polls and maybe we'll have big issues and opinions but in some completely different form and that's what this topic is for, to suggest ideas how to improve the already existing formats from the other websites without simply stealing them or propose ideas for the completely new formats.

So, any ideas?

So as you've probably noticed, we use Patreon for the donations system and it provides API access to its platform, which would allow us to implement an automatic reward system (not super simple but possible). So the question is, how should we rewards the pledgers? Obviously it should be something that doesn't make the pledgers in any way above the others. I'd suggest it to be something aesthetic. Any ideas?

Hi folk,

I believe someone suggested the idea that the voting period of the debates should be prolonged if the mods delete any votes, so what do you think about it? 

Should we go for it? And if so, for how long should they be prolonged?

I am having another random idea that I wanted to discuss.

So as you can see in the debates section, we have lots of low quality debates, like the ones that type1 spammed or just forfeited ones or that kinda stuff, so I am thinking if it makes sense to create a separate elite "league", in which only "serious" debaters would be invited and they'd have separate ratings, separate everything, because it doesn't really makes sense that people that spend hours on their arguments compete with people saying that ducks are dangerous. And what we have now could be a sandbox for the new people to prove (or to learn) that they deserve to be invited to the elite league. Obviously it raises some questions but it's a random idea and I haven't given it much thought but I'd still like to hear your comments.

So, what do you think?

I've seen people complaining that we barely have any people here and that's true, but I wanted to point out some things nevertheless.

So first of all, the site has been in production for only 3 months and is still barely indexed by Google, hell if I know why, but it is what it is. Maybe because we don't have a mobile version but I am not sure. But despite that, I still have a few ideas how we could attract new blood here, but it needs to be understood that before it happens, we need to have all the required tools to prevent bad shit from happening and that's gonna take some time to implement and test them. There is simply no way to attract only smart and decent people; idiots, spammers, bots will follow anyway, so we need to be sure that we can contain them.

So the bottom line is that at this point, it's better to have 100 decent and smart people than 300 with 2/3 of those being trouble makers.

Once we have, among other things, some filtering mechanisms, like sandboxes for the new users or stuff like that, we'll let them flood in and cherry pick the good ones.

I am wondering if it would a handy thing to have private forum topics? By private, I mean that only users, invited by the creator of the topic, would have access to it and I guess they wouldn't be moderated either, since neither the mods nor I would have an access to them, that is, if we're not invited.

What do you think?

Before we implement the moderation system, it would make sense to decide what rights moderators must have.

For example, I imagine they would be able to remove topics and posts and maybe temporarily ban people. What else? Let's put up a list here.

We know that the social network groups that we have are rather ugly but we promise it's gonna change at some point.

If you would like to help with those, please, just let us know, we'd appreciate any help :)

If you have any questions, answers to which you think would be interesting to many people, that's the perfect place to ask them.

The members of the team that is behind this website are not English native speakers so it's expected that some parts of the website may have rather bad English. So if you have found some errors that you'd like to help fixing, please, just let us know and we'll fix it in now time!

Thank you for understanding!