“it’s unclear whether it has any ongoing influence on the gamestate or not” - what argument would there be for it having an ongoing influence? It seems clearly an unregulated non-gamestate blog entry, no different to me posting something meaningless in the “Story Post, Votable Matter” category. Any admin would be free to uncategorise it.

@Kevan: “Gamestate Tracking” currently defines all Votable Matters as official posts. Presumably, one is created in a way not specified by the rules, it isn’t a Votable Matter. But what if one is created in a way that was specified by the rules, at the time? It’s not obvious to me that it ceases to be votable just because the rule has been repealed.

The current definition is just “A Votable Matter is a post which Meeples may cast Votes on, such as a Proposal, a Call for Judgement or a Declaration of Victory.” – it isn’t obvious to me that repealing the rule prevents votes being cast, so the post may remain votable.

That said, if the consensus is just to decategorise these posts, I can live with that – I doubt it really matters. I just made this proposal because I noticed that in practice players haven’t decategorised them, and it isn’t clear from the rules whether doing so is legal or not.

I don’t see the point in this at all (seems clear to me that it can be decategorised now), but I guess it can’t hurt

It’s adding 600 words to the ruleset for all future dynasties. Even if it’s harmlessly pointless because other rules or conventions already cover it, we’d be wasting the time of future players who were trying to read about Official Posts.

We don’t even need the sticking plaster in this case, as the Bounties Building Block says that “Despite its category, it is not a votable matter and any votes on it are ignored.”

Just for now because ais and Kevan make great points

Agreeing with Kevan: “no different to me posting something meaningless in the “Story Post, Votable Matter” category. Regardless of whether it had meaning in past rules, once those rules are repealed, it’s no different.

I decategorized “Bounty Notice: Mutable Words” as a Votable Matter (it’s still a Story Post). If anyone believes this was in error, feel free to revert or CfJ.

@Kevan: The bounty wasn’t created using the Bounties Building Block, but a similar dynastic rule which did create an actual Votable Matter.

I think that the fact that a) players seem to agree that it is or should be fine to decategorise this sort of post (including me!) and b) that nobody actually did means that the fact that the consensus isn’t documented is having a bit of a chilling effect – we seem to have a case where people think an action should be legal, but aren’t performing it because they don’t know whether other people think it should be legal.

One solution to the problem is to have a discussion every time it comes up. Another is for players to guess what other players would believe to be legal, and perform the action anyway. The remaining possibility is to record the precedent somewhere: we could either use a separate document for the purpose, or to record it in the Appendix, which seems to be intended for that purpose.

For what it’s worth, I am open to withdrawing this proposal if consensus is that it should be sufficiently obvious that this is legal. (I do not object to the decategorisation – even if it was technically illegal it surely doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t cause any ongoing damage.)

CoV per Kevan

I really don’t think it’s all that deep, people probably just didn’t notice that it was still there… I definitely didn’t until you pointed it out

Either that or they noticed it was there but didn’t care enough to decategorise it, seeing as it’s hardly relevant to anything going on right now

“Another is for players to guess what other players would believe to be legal, and perform the action anyway” is the option I prefer. The easiest way to find out if something is ok or not is to try it and see what happens (assuming there’s no real harm in trying it).

Annoyingly, I sort of agree with ais - a post being designated an Official Post by a rule doesn’t mean that it automatically ceases to be an Official Post if that justfication is withdrawn, any more than a player achieving Victory ceases to have achieved Victory if the conditions that allowed for it change.

This is, however, too many words for a concept that could be handled much more simply. 

Withdrawn per discussion.