Thursday, October 27, 2011

A reminder on proper proposal conditioning.

A lot of you have been doing stuff like “If the proposal “Employment” failed, this proposal does nothing.” at the start of your proposal. Especially in a case like this, there is a reasonable chance that a proposal “Employment” has already been made years ago. (It doesn’t actually look like it has in this case, given the URL is just http://blognomic.com/archive/employment/). Regardless, conditioning your proposals based on various proposals passing is risky and you should either do “If the ruleset currently contains the rule X” if possible, or explicity reference which proposal you’re refering to with a URL or something.

Also, when cross references rules in proposals or rule text, ALWAYS refer to rules by name only. If you include numbers as well, they might change causing problems down the road.

Remember, only you can prevent rules lawyers from ruining stuff on technicalities.

posted by Clucky at 27 Oct 2011 18:19:38 UTC Comments (4)

Comments

arthexis: he/him

27-10-2011 18:27:36 UTC

for

ais523:

27-10-2011 18:52:25 UTC

I normally refer to rules by name; but in my case, there was an obvious typo in the proposed rule name, so I didn’t know if it would still have the same name by the time my proposal passed (it’s admin discretion), so I referred to the proposal itself. As an extra safeguard, I specified the exact text to replace, which wouldn’t be in the ruleset if the proposal didn’t pass.

Pavitra:

27-10-2011 21:24:45 UTC

arrow

Spitemaster:

28-10-2011 04:38:40 UTC

Ooh, okay.  I didn’t know.  Thanks for the info!