BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

Against, from idle. That is a huge increase in the number of words in the ruleset for something that, as the comment box says, we can currently do informally anyway. Having some example code in the wiki is not unhelpful but it doesn’t need to be in the ruleset.

Fair point Brendan about the length, I just cut it down from over 400 words to around 200. Is that more palatable?

Also, I would say there was nothing informal about how it was done in the elevator dynasty. Kevan still had to make the template and propose that it become gamestate. The main benefit of this is that it allows emperors more freedom to add styles without having to go through a formal process.

Wouldn’t this mean that if someone wants to add flair in a later dynasty, they would need to get their flair added to the list of flairs, which would take a proposal as that list is now gamestate? So I think this actually just makes things worse. 

The content of the list of flairs is flavourtext. To make a flair all you have to do is make the page with the CSS, and you’re free to edit it as long as it’s not currently being used in the ruleset.

Just because its flavourtext doesn’t mean it can be changed. My understanding is that if we link to [[List of Flairs]], it becomes gamestate and so people can’t add stuff to it on their own. Am I wrong?

@Zack I would say that Kevan didn’t have to pass a proposal to change the stylesheet in the elevator dynasty, he chose to - with the evidence for that being that formatting was added uncontroversially and without a proposal in the Card Game dynasty, #186.

@Clucky The question of wiki page gamestate content is a bit vexed - the most recent debate on it resolved with wiki pages being gamestate but not their contents - but in this case, given that the contents of the page are templates, it’ll be covered by “All wiki pages… and any images or Templates contained within those Wiki Pages are assumed to be Gamestate.” So people may be able to add stuff but they won’t be able to change or remove anything without a subsequent proposal.

I like the template a lot, but I’m still unconvinced that its documentation needs to be recorded in the ruleset - or, as Clucky observes, locked down as unalterable gamestate.

We do need to expand the “images or Templates contained within those Wiki Pages” gamestate definition to include CSS, so that Flairs can’t be altered once they’re in place. And that may be all we actually need to do.

I’m not sure about allowing the Emperor alone to apply styles - it’s good for getting the rules styled quickly, but is ultimately allowing a malign or malignly-advised Emperor to tinker directly with the rules page. (“Flair has no effect on the rules or gamestate unless specified by the ruleset.” possibly doesn’t work if someone makes a Flair that makes text appear in the ruleset which declares that the Flair has an effect after all. It can also be exploited in the other direction by adding text that looks like a rule or a word, but actually isn’t.)

@Clucky I was not aware that it was done informally in the card game dynasty, but if I was there I would have objected on the grounds of “The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset.”

@Keven I believe I’ve already addressed both of your concerns in the rule as written:

> “The CSS styles of a flair may not add or remove text from the ruleset, or otherwise obscure/alter the contents of the ruleset except in appearance. Any Wizard or Idle Wizard may edit a flair’s CSS if it is not in the ruleset, or if it does not meet these criteria, to make it so.”

Also, Mediawiki does not support the “content” CSS rule for inline styles so I don’t even think it’s possible to add text to the ruleset purely through CSS. And even if someone tried to do something like that, it would be a code rules scam which wouldn’t fly.

Sorry for the typos, I’m on my phone. I meant @Josh and @Kevan.

And core* rules scam

per Kevan

[Zack] It would be legal for me to edit the CSS of a Flair that was currently in use in the ruleset, I think? Your rule says that I “may edit a flair’s CSS if it is not in the ruleset”, but doesn’t say that I may not edit it if it is in the ruleset - and nothing is happening to define the CSS page as gamestate, as I read it.

And I’d say there’s still scam potential in the negative space. If a scammer makes a Flair that adds an image of the word “not” to a sentence of a rule, then that addition isn’t considered legal text and is just altering the visual appearance of the page ... but if another player misinterprets it as being legal text and takes (or doesn’t take) actions accordingly, that could be useful to the scammer.

@Kevan I feel like you’re splitting hairs here. “Any Wizard or Idle Wizard may edit a flair’s CSS if it is not in the ruleset” strongly implies the opposite, that you can’t edit a flairs CSS if it is in the ruleset. As long as we all agree there’s no issue, and if we don’t there would be a CfJ.

Also, mediawiki has built in safeguards to prevent online CSS from injecting content into a page. You can’t use the “content” or “background-image” properties for instance so that’s a non issue. I dropped the idea of using templatestyles for that reason.

And again, that would be a core rules scam and anyone who tried something like that should be ashamed of themself.

inline CSS* not online

Also even if you could add an image, adding an image which contains text would still count as adding text to the ruleset.

Worth splitting some hairs to see if the group thinks there is anything there. I think you’re right, though, it looks like “strongly implies the opposite” is actually backed up by the common sense way in which gamestate comes into existence - once it’s “information which the Ruleset regulates the alteration of”, it’s gamestate, and can’t also be edited in other ways.

I think whether adding an image of some text counts as “adding text to the ruleset” is debatable. As is whether that would mean that such an image cannot be added to the ruleset, or merely can be added but once there cannot be regarded as text. I defer to you on what MediaWiki automatically blocks, though.

My main reservations are whether we need to put all of this documentation in the ruleset (that declaring in-use CSS pages to be gamestate might be all we need to say), and whether it’s necessary to give the Emperor a shortcut to impose it at will.