BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I have concerns over just being like “oh we can restore an improperly failed proposal its old state like nothing happened” because of how timing works. someone might see a proposal was enacted (or failed) and not realize they actually have an opportunity to go back and vote for it.

feels like it is better for the CfJ to just rubber stamp over Josh’s mistake and then we can have a better discussion on how to deal with problems like this in the future without the pressure of fixing the gamestate potentially making us reach a rash decision

There’s at least two bugs relevant to this in “Official Posts”, and this CFJ only fixes one of them.

The other is the much-maligned “Any post that is or is made illegal as a result of an infraction against any of the prohibitions set out in this rule continues to be an Official Post but may no longer have any effect on the ruleset or the gamestate.” – this was added to stop a scam, but it also stops a lot of legitimate reversions (e.g. it forced my DoV to be done twice). As long as that remains in the ruleset, accidentally illegally enacting a proposal, then reverting the enaction, means that when the proposal is re-enacted it won’t do anything.

This could definitely do with fixing but it may take some thought to work out what the best fix is.

One other thought: if an illegal enactment/failure is reverted, the proposal hasn’t been “open for voting” for however long it was illegally closed for, so it might well end up getting illegally enacted/failed again (in theory jamming the queue because it’s still pending until it gets explicitly failed by someone). It’d be ideal to have some way to prevent this sort of thing queue-jamming.

Maybe it’s time for me to retry my proposal about “good-faith admin actions should get upheld automatically”? At the time, I remember there were arguments against it on the basis that it’s better to just revert them, but these events are showing that reverting them may have more problems than it seems.

That leaves open the door for a good faith but mistaken enactment of a proposal that is Unpopular.

Ah right. I looked at my proposal on the matter, and it was specific to good-faith enactment/failures that were out of sequence but otherwise legal (so that enactment mistakes wouldn’t hold up the rest of the proposals in the queue). It’s probably important for safety that a proposal needs sufficiently many votes in order to be enacted.

The changes now make exceptions for overturning illegal resolutions in both places.

Yes, wherever an illegal resolution is overturned, a note should be made of how long it was closed.

well if its clear you’re going to try and force a change through the ruleset via CFJ guess someone else needs to give us the “lets just uphold stuff” option so we’re not pressured into making a mistake

I’d probably use the word “reverted” rather than “overturned”, but I’m in agreement with this (as a rules patch) even as-is. It’s possible that this patch will eventually turn out to be too small, but it nonetheless surely has to be an improvement on the current situation.

I’m likely to vote for both this CFJ and Clucky’s. This is a complex topic, though, so I’m definitely going to give this one its full edit period in case further changes are needed.

I’m not sure this really solves the problem. Overturning an illegal resolution doesn’t actually change the status of a official blogpost—cause if the action was illegally done the status never actually changed.

Under the current rules, illegally editing a votable matter, even though it doesn’t change its status, does set it into a sort of “illegal” status in which it can’t do anything and it counts as Unpopular. That was intended to discourage scams based on editing official posts in weird ways, but it hits legitimate mistakes much more often.

This CFJ solves one aspect of the problem, that frequently causes problems in practice – if the illegal edit was an attempt to resolve the votable matter, this allows the illegal edit to be undone without making the post itself illegal as a consequence.

because of the “except that a votable matter’s illegal resolution may be overturned.” problem

because I trust ais523 to find any problems with this

A note to help avoid any potential mistakes adminning this: CFJs to change core rules work even if they time out (it’s only proposals to change core rules that fail if they time out).