Proposal: [Appendix] Consistent Timing
Reached quorum 9 votes to 0. Enacted by Kevan.
Adminned at 09 Apr 2025 12:52:49 UTC
Amend the Appendix rule Date and Time Tracking to be the following:
The Entry Date field of an Official Post may be modified by its author, an Admin, or the Concierge, only under the following conditions and only in the following ways:
* If an Official Post is older than 7 days but needs to remain Sticky on the front page of the Blog then its Entry Date may be edited to the time of the edit, to within a minute, with the original date and time at which it was posted added to the Commentary or flavour text field of that post, in which case the original time of posting remains the time at which it was posted.
* If an Official Post has been made visible on the blog within the preceding 6 hours, then the Entry Date field may be amended to match the timestamp for the first revision of the post (i.e. the timestamp for the initially posted version).
The main reason I’m altering this is to solve two issues:
1) Sometimes posts get misordered where one is posted first and the other slips in front of it in the queue. If both modify the same locations of the ruleset, this can be somewhat messy, especially in cases where there’s no edit window.
2) If we drastically reduce the edit window at any future point, we want to give the ability to reclaim as much of the true edit window as possible rather than having people unintentionally burn up half their window.
I figure 6 hours is enough for voters to adapt if someone does end up moving it, but I wouldn’t object to going down as low as maybe an hour.
I never knew that the timestamp for the first revision was different from the Entry Date! Always assumed they were the same and that we’d never know when a blog entry had truly been posted.
ais523:
Not voting yet as this is in edit window, but I approve of this – there have been some high-profile cases where getting the order exactly right matters (in at least one previous dynasty, that determined victory), and if proposals appear in the wrong order they are quite likely to be accidentally adminned in the wrong order, causing the newer proposal to not apply its changes.