(Mini news story: The user usafkid1121 has announced his resignation from DDO, and has taken credit for the odd type of vote bombing that occurred a few weeks ago.)

In the thread Text Formatting in Debates, prominent user s0m31john announced a third-party script, which allows users to format their text in debates with bold, italics, underline, block-quotes, and colors.

The script runs off the Mozilla Firefox add-on Greasemonkey, which users must have installed in order to convert debate markup (e.g. [b][/b], [quote][quote], [color][/color]) into the desired format.

Many users have applauded s0m31john’s efforts, including Volkov, mongeese, Logical-Master, and patsox834. RoyLantham, for example, raves, “Good idea. I don’t see why everyone has to use it.” Two users have complained who do not use Firefox, and PoeJoe has shunned the use of third-party software, but the response has been generally positive.

Only time will tell if this add-on takes off.

Tags: formatting, markup, s0m31john — written by PoeJoe @ 10:19 pm

“I’ve been oddly votebombed over the last few months. It’s not a suddenly I have zero wins type of obvious votebombing but it very specifically keeps me below #1. If I am two below the top place and add three wins with additional debates, I will quickly be voted down to keep me under that line and LogicalMaster in #1. Not in my most recent debates but in debates going progressively older. It’s an interesting phenomenon,” said Tatarize in the thread Odd type of Votebombing.

Suspecting a group of people to be involved with a massive leader board conspiracy, Logical-Master and Kleptin agreed.

To test his hypothesis, Tatarize vote bombed Logical-Master’s debates to find that someone quickly counter-vote bombed LM’s debates. LM cited a debate of his that he said was once 28-28 but which quickly became 35-49 in his favor.

LM then noticed votes being deleted (probably because of the vote bomb removal system, this reporter suspects). Soon after he quickly vote bombed himself to find that his work was being undone.

Kleptin bombed LM and boosted Tatarize to find that his work was also being undone. Not only was his work being undone, Kleptin writes, “but they did it very, VERY quickly and dropped Tatarize even lower than he started out at. This is very strange.”

Then LM, for real, started getting vote bombed.

In response to all this, Tatarize deleted his account and posted two debates that he claims “[are] impossible to accept.”

Tags: Kleptin, Logical-Master, Tatarize, vote bomb — written by PoeJoe @ 1:15 pm

Congratulations to theLwerd, JBlake and InquireTruth on their victory of the 2nd debate.com mafia game.

Being the moderator of the game, I will say that it was a rather impressive performance as these users’ teamwork allowed them to go unsuspected throughout most of the game (not to mention that plenty of townies were manipulated into being killed due to their combined efforts). Unfortunately, the game ended with the townies pretty much forfeiting, though one can only wonder how it would have turned out if the users maintained the same fervor they had when the game had begun.

That said, burningpuppies101 has commenced the third Mafia Game with a thread entitled “MAFIA GAME 3:Day Phase One Official.” The idea has been affirmed: Mafia will remain a fundamental part of Debate.org’s essence.

Tags: burningpuppies101, mafia — written by Logical-Master @ 12:47 pm

As of last night, debate.com is no more. Now, it is called debate.org

That said, many are rather curious as to why the name has changed.

I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the site owner sold the domain for a profit.

That’s not necessarily the case, of course, but IIRC there are no rules about what sites are .com and which are .org, so I’m hard-pressed to come up with another explanation.

“PoeJoe counter-sued Debate.com so the owners migrated the site to avoid liability. Possibly.

Otherwise, perhaps a new buyer wanted the name for their own project so the owners used some of the revenue from the sale to buy an alternative URL?”

Could it be true? Has PoeJoe finally popped a blood vessel and retaliated against debate.com for their initial threat to sue? One cannot be too sure, but it would explain the decision to change to site to a seemingly inferior name, as is the opinion of some members:

The user known as  s0m31john had nothing more than this about the name change in the website:

Lame.

The moderator later explained with . . .

This website doesn’t make any money…maybe about $5/day. Yeehah! As such, it doesn’t make good business sense to keep paying big bucks every month to lease the domain Debate.com. Instead, we purchased Debate.org, and now this site can stay up forever. You still won’t get better customer support (sorry), but at least this site will still be up and running. I don’t get much time over here anymore except to close the spammers and multi-accounts, because I’m building DORK.com. I’ll be sending out an email to all of the members tonight with a general explanation of the change. [No explanation was given in the email; it just said "We wanted to let you know that Debate.com has permanently changed its name to Debate.org. This change does not affect any of the existing site features or content."]

. . . and even later with . . .

We’re just not made of money, therefore we have to work on other projects with a better return. We’ve taken tremendous risk with our personal cash and have spent over 10,000 man hours (with no payday) on this website. We believe the site will continue to slowly grow, and when it reaches a point where the ROI is greater, then we’ll come back to it. We have to eat too. Geeze, what happened to all you bleeding heart liberals? Where’s our free handout?…I say with sarcasm…we don’t expect a handout (or a bailout)!

This reporter thus encourages all to promote DDC Debate.org!

Tags: 2009, brian_eggleston, change, Debate.com Awards, debate.org, Logical-Master, mandatory RFD, Phil, vote bomb — written by Logical-Master @ 12:41 pm