On January 29, 2009, at around 6:00 PM (PST), Josh, with the account “rightwing,” emerged once again on the DDC forums.
He and many others (primarily askbob) battled it out on the threads “Info Tyme!,” “Stop Vote Bombing Me,” “The Reinstating of the CLEANERS,” “Semantics,” “Cleaners Reborn,” “I formally ask to be elected…,” “Have your debate cleaned here:,” and “Banishment.” Josh stated repeatedly that his bombing raid would stop once all the cleaners renounced their memberships. Others, such as PoeJoe and JBlake, responded by saying that The Cleaners was not a formal group — as they do not coordinate together — but rather, they were merely an ideological group whose sole purpose was to read debates, vote, and leave RFDs.
Other opinions were thrown about as well. burningpuppies101 asked to be “formally elected” the leader of the cleaners in an attempt to formally destroy the group. He wrote in a PM, “If I become the leader, I can disband the Cleaners. Josh’s only motive for being here is that he still thinks we vote as a bloc. So if there is no bloc, there should be no reason for Josh. Then perhaps we can get somewhere.”
Logical-Master made the point that Josh would never stop, that he was only bombing to improve his ego. He stated, “I don’t know if this has been mentioned above, but I’ve called josh out on his so-called motives before. At one minute minute, his only purpose here is to stop semantics against new debaters. At another, it is to do that and combat the evil cleaners. At even another, it is just to get the cleaners (who he claimed to have been inactive hence ‘defeated’) to publicly renounce their actions. Does this sound like someone with a solid (or even somewhat rational) motivation to you?”
askbob wanted everybody to just ignore Josh in the hopes that he would get bored and go way. He posted everywhere the message, “PLEASE REFER TO THE BANISHMENT THREAD.” His attempt, however, has received very negative feedback.
Josh’s reappearance even caused a formal debate to be instigated. With KRFournier as PRO and JBlake as CON, the debate was entitled “Debate.com voter data should be publicly available.” Fournier argued, “By exposing votes and voters alike, accountability can be added to the site. This will assist in identifying abusers of the voting system as well as encourage members to vote more honestly,” while Blake noted “Instituting a system whereas all votes are public knowledge would be utterly ineffective when the voter does not care if his ‘vote bomb’ is public knowledge; of if is a ’suicide vote bombing’ account. The proposed reform would useless if a regular moderator(s) was not hired to monitor new votes or to investigate claims of voter abuse.” JBlake suggested, further, that the vote bomb removal program would be much more effective. As of this writing, KRFournier is winning by ten points.
In a debate titled “I have a suspicion that this debate will be vote bombed,” PoeJoe noted “It’s ironic. For every Josh vote Fournier gets, more legitimate are prompted to go to LM, which only makes Josh have to vote Fournier further, which only gives more legitimate votes to LM, and so on. . . . It’s recursive!” At the time of his writing, the score was 33-33. At the time of this writing, it is 42-42.
In the previously mentioned thread, “Have your debate cleaned here (a thread askbob opened for others to post their debates to be cleaned by The Cleaners),” Josh wrote, “I hope all know that by posting a debate here will attract the attention of EVERYBODY that can view this website.” By this, of course, he meant that he would give about one hundred points to the opponents of every debater that posted a debate in that thread.
Josh’s account, rightwing, has since been closed by the moderators.
Tags: askbob, burningpuppies101, JBlake, josh, KRFournier, Logical-Master, PoeJoe, rightwing, The Cleaners, vote bloc, vote bomb — written by PoeJoe @ 12:40 pm