Friday, May 16, 2025

Call for Judgment: [Appendix] Proposals in Interregnum are broken

Reached quorum 5 votes to 1. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 16 May 2025 17:17:33 UTC

In the subrule “Other” of the Appendix rule “Keywords”, in the definition of “Hiatus”, change

If BlogNomic is on Hiatus, Dynastic Actions may not be taken (except where the rule defining the action explicitly requires it to be taken during Hiatus), and Proposals may not be submitted or Resolved.

to

If BlogNomic is on Hiatus, Dynastic Actions may not be taken (except where the rule defining the action explicitly requires it to be taken during Hiatus), and Proposals may not be submitted or Resolved unless a core rule permits doing so for that type of Hiatus.

The ability to make and resolve proposals during Interregnum is currently broken, because the appendix prevents proposals being made and resolved during Hiatus unconditionally, and although the core rules permit doing so during Interregnum, they define Interregnum as a type of Hiatus and the core rules are unable to override the appendix.

This needs urgent attention because there’s a (non-dynastic) proposal pending at the moment and someone might try to illegally resolve it otherwise, meaning that we’d end up with the ruleset tracker being different from the actual ruleset.

Comments

Kevan: he/him

16-05-2025 15:39:23 UTC

for

Clucky: he/him

16-05-2025 16:04:23 UTC

against

This is the wrong fix. If there is an issue, its an issue in Prioritisation where “The Appendix has precedence over any other Rule” shouldn’t be able to overrule “Additionally, Proposals may be submitted and resolved as normal, provided that they only have the effect of amending the non-dynastic ruleset and/or the Building Blocks page.”

JonathanDark: he/him

16-05-2025 16:11:39 UTC

I disagree with Clucky. We shouldn’t alter the general principles of Prioritisation just for the sake of this one issue.

for

qenya: she/they

16-05-2025 16:15:28 UTC

for

Clucky: he/him

16-05-2025 16:20:33 UTC

@JonathanDark is it really just one issue? Feels like there could easily be other stuff that we want to be able to apply scoping rules too but actually can’t because turns out the appendix can’t be overwritten.

DoomedIdeas: he/him

16-05-2025 16:21:39 UTC

for

ais523: Supervisor

16-05-2025 16:26:09 UTC

It’s caused trouble in the past (e.g. the bug where CFJs couldn’t make illegal official posts legal), but doesn’t cause trouble very often and thus is still probably the most sensible default.

I can see a potential argument that “appendix overrides core, except where the core rule is narrower in scope” might be a better rule than the current one, but it wouldn’t have fixed the CFJ issue because the appendix rule had narrower scope there (being specific to making illegal posts legal, whereas CFJs can make ruleset and gamestate changes in general).

JonathanDark: he/him

16-05-2025 16:52:56 UTC

I think the most sensible approach is to tackle the corner cases where they appear, like this one, and if a pattern happens to emerge that we can generalize in an update to Prioritisation, only then should we attempt it.

Right now, I don’t think we can guess at the right wording that would be less cumbersome than what we already have.