Platform development

Author: DebateArt.com

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New changes:

Now every forum post has a number which works as a link to that post. You can copy it and share it with other people.

As always, let me know if something works in an unexpected way or doesn't work at all.
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Suggestion:
I know a lot of people from DDO forums don't like the polls or the opinions section but people do use them and I believe it will help attract more people to this site if we have them. 

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maybe make the pins a shaded colour of orange, like they are on DDO so it's obvious which posts are pins and where the normies start.
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If anyone has suggested a preview feature for debate arguments and forum posts, that would be greatly appreciated. I didn't know what my argument formatting would look like when I posted my argument, so I had to butcher my APA6th style referencing format to ensure it didn't end in chaos. If I could check what the argument would look like beforehand it would allow me to make my arguments a lot more neater and aesthetic. 
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@DebateArt.com
Could you add something where arguments that have been written but not posted (I mean stuff that's in the "type new argument here" text box) are saved even when you close the tab? I spent an hour on an argument, but then lost it all when I incorrectly thought I had posted it and closed the tab.

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@DebateArt.com
It is possible just not too obvious I imagine, you can just click on the timestamp in the last post column, the one that says "5 minutes ago" or something like that.
It's probably not immediately clear to newcomers that the time stamp is a link. Putting the link under the time stamp and calling it "View Recent" or "View Last Post" might be better.
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@DebateArt.com
We also need an ELO ranking, not just a win percentage. I'll talk to Max sometime to figure out what the precise ELO equation is.
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@bsh1
There is one, right now you should be at 1500
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@Smithereens
Oh. Duh. Thanks. Didn't immediately register "Rating" as "ELO."

I am still interested in what equation is being used to calculate it.
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@XLAV
I know a lot of people from DDO forums don't like the polls or the opinions section but people do use them and I believe it will help attract more people to this site if we have them. 
Truth be told, I am also not a fan of those. I believe there are a lot of polls website out there and we could those instead of we need to do some polling and it would rather hard to come up with something unique here. Regarding the opinions, it would make sense to have something like that at some point but we'd need to drastically change the format. But it's hard to say anything at this point.


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@Smithereens
If anyone has suggested a preview feature for debate arguments and forum posts, that would be greatly appreciated. I didn't know what my argument formatting would look like when I posted my argument, so I had to butcher my APA6th style referencing format to ensure it didn't end in chaos. If I could check what the argument would look like beforehand it would allow me to make my arguments a lot more neater and aesthetic. 
I will try to add it, sure :)


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@Castin
It's probably not immediately clear to newcomers that the time stamp is a link. Putting the link under the time stamp and calling it "View Recent" or "View Last Post" might be better. 
Yeah, you are right, I'll make it more obvious.


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Suggestion: I think it would be good to put a list of all the user's debates on their profile like there is on DDO. 
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@Jhhillman
Could you add something where arguments that have been written but not posted (I mean stuff that's in the "type new argument here" text box) are saved even when you close the tab? I spent an hour on an argument, but then lost it all when I incorrectly thought I had posted it and closed the tab.
I believe it should ask you if you want to close the tab when you are writing an argument to prevent accidentally closing it, so it should help a little. Regarding this caching system, I am not sure how it could be done but I could play with it and see what's what :)
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@David
Suggestion: I think it would be good to put a list of all the user's debates on their profile like there is on DDO.
Yeah, profiles will definitely be extended to include that kinda information, just a matter of time. Not sure how to design this stuff ...


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@DebateArt.com
If you need help with design, I can possible help. 
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New minor changes:

1) Added the indication of the banned users

2) Changed the debate arguments size from 20k to 30k characters (it still varies because it depends on the amount of formatting)

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<3 
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@David
I think I could come up with something not too ugly for the profile page but if you could help with something for the main page, that'd be highly appreciated because at the moment it's an abomination and I have no idea how to make it decent :(
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@DebateArt.com
What's the indication a user was banned? Red username on profile?


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@DebateArt.com
I'll see what I can come up with! :D 
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That is already in place. What I am talking about is already in place on DDO.  It isn't essential but it would be really useful.

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@Jhhillman
Alrighty, I'll take a look, thanks!
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@DebateArt.com
The sites that I'm used to, a red username is typically reserved for site administrators and staff. I might sugges tpossibly using red for site admins and green or blue for site moderators. As it stands now, one may think RationalMadman is a staffer because of his red name.

For banned users, I would consider making their names a lighter color grey, italicized, and crossed out. 

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@David
The sites that I'm used to, a red username is typically reserved for site administrators and staff. I might sugges tpossibly using red for site admins and green or blue for site moderators. As it stands now, one may think RationalMadman is a staffer because of his red name.

For banned users, I would consider making their names a lighter color grey, italicized, and crossed out.
Good idea! I also wasn't sure about the red one. I'll check it out tonight and probably push it to the next release.


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Would it be possible to get activity notifications to appear (that little dot next to the bell) without having to change the page?
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Suggestion: Debates should have variable word count limits, where the instigator can choose the limits. The rationale of limits is that it can do several things: force conciseness, narrow the scope of the debate, reduce technicality of the debate, make the debate easy to read etc.

30k characters is a huge amount. Each round can be the size of scientific paper, which makes voting on the debate only possible for those who have too much disposable time and motivation on their hands. On the flip side, character limits tend to punish those with better sourcing, as more sources means more characters. 

Maybe a references section in each round that doesn't count characters would be feasible?

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@Castin
Yeah surely, but I am afraid not any time soon because it would be quite some work to do it properly
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@Smithereens
It's probably possible to implement something like this but I am afraid it would be error prone and rather complicated.

One problem is that the argument texts already include formatting so we'd need to first get rid of it, which by itself can be error-prone. Then we'd need to probably ignore words in the quotes and stuff like that, that's another reason for errors. Then we'd need to decide what's considered a word and what's not and write an algorithm for that. I am not saying it's impossible, just time consuming to do it properly so I'd say it would be considered at the later stages.

Regarding the limit of 30k, I bumped it because RM managed to hit the one of 20k so I thought it wasn't big enough. But by no means it's necessary to fill all the available space, an argument can be 100 or 1000 characters, for all we care, it's all context specific I guess.
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I am trying to move from the easier to the hardest. So first we implement the core stuff and then we move to the more complicated and interesting things, there will be video and other formats of the debates, real-time chat, ranking and reward system and so on and so forth.