Hmm… 

It’s possibly better to prevent this by creating a rule banning idling/unidling during certain time-sensitive areas, or by wording the rules such that idling or unidling doesn’t affect it.

Maybe it’s not a loophole, but a feature. Should we encourage this as in the spirit of the game? The problem with that is that Admins could abuse their status by “sitting” on requests for Idle/Un-Idle in order to further their own ends.

There are generally enough admins that you can find one that’ll cooperate with you. (In most nomics, this sort of thing is considered a feature; BlogNomic is historically more ambivalent about such things.)

Maybe an alternative would be requiring Admins to Idle/Un-Idle in the order that requests are posted, and to not allow Admins to I/U-I themselves without first posting to the blog.

Generally, if something Game-Breaking can happen due to Idling/Unidling in a specific time period, then we just make specific Rules disallowing Idling/Unidling during that period.

My specific problem is with the term “abuse”, which is ill-defined, as idling / unidling is a change in the gamestate in and of itself. If you’re going to have this rule then you have to define what and what isn’t abuse, and if you’re going to do that then you might as well just rule out idling / unidling scams on an ad hoc basis.

My intent by leaving it somewhat vague was to make it a “I know it when I see it” sort of rule, so that if people are legitimately going idle, it shouldn’t trigger, but if someone is obviously trying to game the system, the hammer should come down. Since it would require an CfJ anyway, I see no problem with it being done that way… everyone would get a say.

Sounds good to me, since “should” is not binding and “abuse” is subjective.

  I have in the past ended up idling and then unidling in a manner that subverted a proposal in the queue purely by coincidence.  The answer was to fix it via another proposal.

@spikebrennan: Because it’s in 1.10, it isn’t binding per se, but it’s a bannable offense - worse than binding.

This is a major element of the game. Idleing should not be restricted. If you write a rule well enough, it won’t make a difference, and if a person sees a way to win or get a distinct advantage by an idle/unidle, he should be able to do it. Note that posting 2 posts, seconds after each other “I request to be idled”, and then “I request to be unidled as soon as I am idled” has the same effect when an admin gets to it as manually doing it if you are an admin. There is no distinct advantage to be had by admins over any other player with respects to idling, and it can be an involved an interesting game mechanic in certain dynaties. I prefer to leave it to the nomic to write well made rules then BAN someone for making a stratigic action. At very most, it should be said in a dynastic rule that it cannot be done, or that idleing/unidling in a short period (say, 24 hours) has no effect for purposes of a given rule rather than ban someone for it. I repeat,  .