Mm. Interesting.

Sure, let’s try it out.

I think BlogNomic has been pretty strict about edit windows, except for a year where we tried six hours. The full history seems to be:

* When BlogNomic started, you couldn’t edit proposals at all.
* At some point, you could edit until someone posted any kind of comment.
* From August 2014, you could edit until someone made a comment that didn’t start with “Note:”
* From March 2017, you could edit for six hours or until someone voted.
* From May 2018, that became two hours.

With six hours, we were finding that proposals were regularly timing out, I think because active players were sometimes forgetting to go back and vote the next day (if you’ve left commentary that’s concluded “great, I would vote for this” or “this is solid but I don’t like it”, that feels a lot like voting), and less active ones were logging in periodically, feeling that they shouldn’t vote on any of the recent proposals in case the active players shouted at them, and walking away again.

It does depend on the player base, though: the May 2018 dynasty had a very strong moratorium on not voting during an edit window (I think to the point where “locking” anyone’s proposal was considered extremely rude, even a simple one as they might wanted to have added a rider to it), and that was ultimately down to the group and its social norms.

But as a Nomic player I prefer faster, smaller, vote-now proposals that sometimes fail, over complex rule changes that I read in the evening, am not allowed to vote on, and then have to read again in the morning to see if anything was changed or snuck in overnight. An eight-hour window is to some extent saying “if you go to sleep at midnight, maybe don’t bother reading any proposals posted after 4pm”; scattered over timezones, that could close a lot of eyes.

oh god no

we already run into issues with people waiting to vote on proposals in order to give the two hour limit spaces to run it course, or voting too soon and ruffling feathers because now stuff can’t be changed.

this might make people feel like then need to wait eight hours which would lead to more ruffled feathers and more people waiting to vote on stuff and slowing the game down

per others

@Clucky: if you feel like that, I’d recommend making a proposal to go the other way (i.e. no editing if there are any comments or past the first 15 minutes). As it is, the window’s just giving an advantage to people who can stay online continuously for 2 hours after making their proposal, at a time when everyone else is also checking BlogNomic frequently.

FWIW, I see an edit window as a nice compromise between “all these proposals are buggy so nothing ever gets done, because people want to use their slots for something else when they get them back” and “let’s discuss everything in an unofficial post before we propose it”. The smaller the edit window, the slower the game’s likely to go because it means that a higher proportion of proposals fail, whereas the absolute number of proposals is limited by proposal slots, so it slows down the rate at which proposals can do anything. I consider that a much bigger problem than proposals timing out (maybe because I’m used to nomics where the only way proposals can get enacted is timing out).

(Another possibility would be immediately refunding people’s slots when they had a proposal that’s a good idea but contains bugs – to reduce the cost of making a buggy proposal – but I think I’ve been comprehensively outvoted on that one by now.)

I’ve been considering my vote here, with the difficulty that I agree with ais and also with Clucky and Kevan. I think on balance that ais is correct, that the status quo is kind of a weird compromise that doesn’t quite work; I know that the platform for BN 3.0 has tools that will allow us to fine-tune this better but for now a change is certainly needed. I’m voting for this knowing that it has potential pitfalls but would echo ais’ comment that counter-proposals would be welcome.

ExpressionEngine has some options: we were saying a while back (after a new player erroneously assumed that it was still legal to edit a proposal after the window because the “edit” link was still there) that it’d be possible to change a page’s display template based on how old it was.

We could, I think, write “PROPOSAL LESS THAN EIGHT HOURS OLD AND >500 WORDS, PLEASE WAIT FOR DISCUSSION TO END BEFORE VOTING” across the top of comment boxes if that was the tone we wanted to strike. There’s maybe even a way to fade out voting icons cast during the window, although that might be optimistic.

The 3.0 features I was thinking of were sidebar widgets that showed which proposals you hadn’t voted on, so they could have a howeverlong protosal window and still notify people to check back in later, when they were open for voting.