So You Wanna Fight? ATS Debate Tournament (Tournament Update)

I must apoligise to all those involved in the organisation of the debate, and my opponent. The debate started literally 1 day after I went on holiday and I was only able to use the internet for 10 minutes a day. Not even close to being enough time for research

Quite alright Oz. I've been forced out of tournaments myself. In fact, unfortunately, I had to leave a tournament right after I had advanced to the Championship Round for the second time- would have had a second pennant, but instead I had to go attend to a matter of life and death, and watch a miracle happen.

All we can do is all we can do- as long as nobody drops out of a tournament to join the circus, I'm cool with it.

reply to post by The Vagabond

Tips
for the junior tournament:

Here are a few of my own:

1) Don't feel the need to open your debate with two paragraphs thanking the moderators, the judges, assorted greek gods, or your cat. The judges have to read dozens of debates. They don't care that you're grateful. But they may be grateful if they don't have to read yet another 20 paragraphs thanking them for putting up with more being thanked.

2) Do not compose your post in a browser window. Use a text editor, word, wordpad, word perfect, office...use windows notepad or vi if you have to. Save it locally. Copy and paste it into your reply and make formatting and tag edits as needed. Composing in a browser window is a notorious way to spend hours typing only to accidentally close or refresh a window, or have a flash ad crash your browser,or have a cat jump on your keyboard, or any number of things that can cause it to all be lost. Don't do it.

3) It is highly recommend that you learn how to use BBCodes. These will allow you to create

quotes

cite external content in a visually pleasing manner

make links that are text instead of web addresses, create italics or bold text, or even italic bold text, make flamboyant text [color=00FF00]p[color=FF0080]r[color=00FF00]e[color=5E5A80]t[color=3BB9FF]t[color=8D38C9]y [color=F6358A]c[color=00FFFF]o[color=4CC417]l[color=FFFF00]o[color=F88017]r[color=F660AB]s, and a variety of other useful things. Some of these can be done by clicking buttons on the compose window. Some of them cannot. While you're at it, check out your media center and learn how to upload pictures, and (important) how to actually embed them into your posts: click on the picture after having been uploaded, then scroll down and look for the "Embed on ATS" entry. It will begin with atsimage in brackets. Copy and paste that to include an image in your post.

Use these features to make your post aesthetically pleasing, not to make it h[color=625D5D]a[color=806D7E]rd [color=5E5A80]to r[color=6A287E]ea[color=7D053F]d.


4) 10,000 characters is a maximum, not a recommendation. If you only have three good ideas, use those three. Don't pad your post with three good idea and a dozen lousy ones. The good ideas might be missed. Being thorough is good. But it sometimes better to leave something unmentioned than to give an argument that leaves the judge feeling like your Strawman Has a Point.

5) Do not fall prey to Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. Nor is it, strictly speaking, necessary to use thoroughly superflous sentence or grammatical structure and/or word choice, nor are redundantly or ridiculously long run-on sentences likely to be of any particular benefit to the arguments that you are making to the judges who are reading your redundantly long sentences that have too many words in them because they are excessively redundant to the point of being entirely too long.

If an idea is simple, phrase it simply. Don't make judges become so lost (or bored) with your phrasing that they may suspect you have nothing of substance to say.

6) Remember that your opponent is your opponent. Don't spend half your post showering him in praise, and don't be so sympathetic to his side of the argument that you forget your own. At least one round has been lost in the primary competition by a participant who argued his opponent's side for him.

7) Paragraph indentations are your friend. Use them.

Putting every sentence on it's own line

is not your friend.

Don't do

that.

8) Remember to enjoy yourself.

reply to post by OzWeatherman


No problem Oz, but now I find myself up against LordBucket, I'm a rookie, he's giving tips to Rookies! On top of that, I get to argue that the internet is not a viable way to change the world, yet here we are, on the internet, changing the world, LOL!

All good though, I love a good challenge, and I can always learn something from each endeavor, so win or lose I come out a better debator!

Everyone has now been given fighter status for the junior tournament and should be able to post in their debate threads now. Sorry for the hold up.

Nosred has withdrawn. There is now another opening. The Junior Tournament is now being opened to debaters eliminated from the senior tournament, in order to fill the roster. U2U me if you wish to participate. Orange-Light has already joined the junior tournament.

Time limits for the Senior Tournament Round 2 Debates have begun.

Another opening has come up in the junior tournament- if anyone is looking for their chance to become a debater this is it.

Event moderator input requested:

My opponent appears to have conceded the debate, but has gone ahead and posted a bunch of stuff anyway.

Here is our debate topic:

"The internet is a viable medium for effecting dramatic change in the physical world”

And here's what my opponent has to say about it:

The dramatic effects of the internet on our world are
apparent in every facet of the developed society.

I readily concede that the internet has already
resulted in a dramatic change to our society

"Readily concede" is awfully formal language, and he's basically saying in his opener that he concedes...well, pretty much what the debate topic is. He acknowledges "dramatic," he agrees that it happens, so obviously it's viable, and he states very clearly that he's talking about the internet. So I'm kind of at a loss here. Is it over? Can I just point out that my opponent has conceded and call it a day? Or do I need to babble on for four more posts giving examples and arguments for things my opponent has already admitted he agrees with?

What do we do here?

"The internet is a viable medium for effecting dramatic change in the physical world”

Future tense?

I readily concede that the internet [b[has already
resulted in a dramatic change to our society

Past Tense...

It could have been a rhetorical error as well. Going off of the length of the post, I would suggest that you proceed with your next post...

There are no "Technical Knock - Outs"- the fight always goes to the cards. If somebody blows their own position out of the water, they still might manage to blow their opponents even further out of the water. The debate may be decided in the first couple of posts, but we won't know that for sure until the judges have read all 10 posts.

reply to post by MemoryShock


Thanks Memory Shock!

I thought it was clear that "has been" is different than "can be," and perhaps this should be addressed in my opponents next post instead of in a different thread?

I did readily concede that part of the debate, so that my opponent did not waste a lot of time rehashing everything the internet has already done, instead of debating its effectiveness going forward.

If my opponent is so confident that they have already won, then they are welcome to make that point in their next post, let me respond, and let the judges decide.

reply to post by getreadyalready


Didn't I already win that debate against you and LordBucket

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

Didn't I already win that debate against you and LordBucket

Link?

I'm a bit confused about something and I'm in need of clarification if possible.......

www.abovetopsecret.com...

If we wanted to add a source such as this one above (used merely for example) in one of our debate posts, would it count as using only 3 charachter spaces in our debate If It was posted like this: (1) ?

And are images using any charachter spaces also or is it not counted?

reply to post by Rising Against

A good way to test your character count is by using the preview function after you have copy/pasted your debate argument (with the accompanying bbcode) in to the post reply field.

Once the preview displays, copy/paste that into a free online character count and that will be the count that will display on the thread.

So, in answer to your question, you can save a few characters if you use "(1)" instead of a default link...

Edit to add - Images, to my knowledge, do not use character count space...but clarification would be appreciated on this one...

reply to post by Rising Against


(1) will be counted as 3 characters when I copy it out of the thread and paste it into a character counter, so yes, that only counts as 3 characters.

edit to add, don't bother clicking the link- it's fakeurl.fake and doesn't go anywhere.

reply to post by The Vagabond
reply to post by MemoryShock


Originally, I wasn't sure if the entire link would be counted or instead just the way you have posted it (using 3 characters as an example) so thanks for clarifying it for me. I don't have to delete a bunch of writing now.

Thanks guys.

now you see me in confusion!
in former times i have been told that every tag of BBCode counts in character count as the [ b][/b ] etc.


so i am checking without the tags and links?

reply to post by orange-light


The change is because ATS no longer has a built-in character counter.
We used to do 500 word opening and closings, 800 word main body posts.
When the character counter came up, it was easier just to use the built in 10k character limit which just happened to count bbcode and everything- it allowed posts to get much longer but it took out a lot of confusion.
Now it's gone again, but we've stuck with character count because there was too much variability in word counts (counting spaces or not counting them, counting punctuation or not, actual words or 5 letters equals a word etc etc etc) and since we can't trust the reply window to limit you, we changed the character count criteria to the way that is easiest to check.

I had hoped to get some replacements into the junior tournament matches that haven't started, but since that isn't going well I have an alternate solution of sorts.

Late tomorrow I will be matching up the people who are still waiting against each other. This will force us either to abandon the single elimination format for the junior tournament or to admit someone who is eliminated from Round 2 of the senior tournament into Round 2 of the junior tournament if we have any takers at that time. We will deal with that when we get there- for now I just want to get the debaters who are still waiting into debates- they've waited far too long.