Monday, October 08, 2012

Proposal: Automatic for the People

Self-killed. Failed by Kevan.

Adminned at 10 Oct 2012 02:18:43 UTC

Set a random Student’s Pen Colour to “Purple”.

Comments

Kevan: he/him

08-10-2012 09:32:39 UTC

against Not sure this does what you intend it to - simply having a Purple pen does not make a person into a Prefect.

Josh: Observer he/they

08-10-2012 09:38:33 UTC

I believe it does - 2.6, “Any Student with a Purple pen is known as a Prefect” - but it does appear to be a different route in, and invalidates a lot of the associated concepts in paragraphs 1, 2 and 4 of 2.15.

s/k against but I would welcome a properly-worded version from someone with a slot.

Kevan: he/him

08-10-2012 09:40:42 UTC

Oh, I’d forgotten about 2.6. That’s a bit risky. I’ll work on a fix later today if nobody else gets there first.

Clucky: he/him

08-10-2012 15:48:09 UTC

Also idle Students are only not Students for the purposes of Dynastic rules, right? So this might wind up doing nothing

Josh: Observer he/they

08-10-2012 15:53:38 UTC

Not quite - “For the purposes of the Ruleset, excluding Rules “Ruleset and Gamestate”, “Students”, “Dynasties”, “Fair Play” and any of those Rules’ subrules, Idle Students are not counted as Students.” Arguably, that sets a precedent that idle Students are not Students by default; equally arguably, because idle Students aren’t students under the the rule covering proposals, any proposal that refers to “Students” cannot include idle Students in the abstract.

In any case all of this would be massively tested by CfJ if it ever became germaine. I suspect that the literal interpretation - that Students refers to non-idle Students by default - would win out, but who knows?

Kevan: he/him

08-10-2012 17:11:23 UTC

Clucky was checking whether Idle Students were only invisible to Dynastic rules, but no, they’re invisible to all rules, apart from a few specific exceptions. This is and always has been fine, and it’s why we needed a “If a Proposal contains a provision that targets a specifically named Idle Student…” exception in 1.2.1.

Clucky: he/him

08-10-2012 17:30:57 UTC

Sorry yeah, they are invisible to most rules, but not to the content of proposals.

I think the purpose of the clause in rule 1.2.1 would be so that we can state “Set Bucky’s Pen Colour to Red” in a proposal, and if Bucky goes idle (and no longer has a pen color) we can set it to red anyways. Otherwise we were needing to say stuff like “Set Bucky’s Pen Colour to Red. If Bucky is idle, if he rejoins the dynasty set his Pen Colour to Red”.

Kevan: he/him

08-10-2012 18:15:04 UTC

They are invisible to most rules including 1.4.2 “Resolution of Proposals”. I don’t think there’s any difference between an admin applying a dynastic rule of “select a random Student” and Rule 1.4.2 saying, after ingesting the proposal, “do what it says in the proposal; select a random Student”.

Clucky: he/him

08-10-2012 18:26:15 UTC

But we specify “For the purposes of the Ruleset…”. A proposal saying “select a random Student” is not part of the ruleset and so no covered by the clause. A dynastic rule saying the same thing is.

Kevan: he/him

09-10-2012 14:26:07 UTC

You’re right, that does look ambiguous. I’ve started a laundry list on the wiki for these sorts of things, and will put out a fix at some point.