Our idling system used to be quite simple - you could ask an admin to idle or unidle you through a medium of your choice, and they could process that request with as much or little fanfare as they liked. In October last year a visiting Agora player was concerned that this was too informal, and proposed that we replace it with a strict system of “idling posts”, so that each idling and unidling would leave a clear and unambiguous paper trail.

In practice, this hasn’t really worked out - if a player or admin deviates slightly from procedure, their un/idle request (or, worse, an admin’s processing of it) is flat out illegal.

Following on from Clucky’s draft from a month ago, this proposal would take us back towards the older system, but requiring un/idle requests to be made as a blog post or comment somewhere. It also stops admin from being able to jokingly re-idle a player who has unidled within seven days of asking to be idled. I think these are the only real issues that ever needed fixing. (There’s a diff comparing it to our original idling rule.)

I’ve tacked on a gamestate-resetting “these players are idle, these aren’t” clause, to cover the likely eventuality that at least one idling or unidling since October was incorrectly documented.