I want to remain an Alan worshipper

I don’t see the proposed changes as prohibiting that. I was careful not to require that BlogNomic usernames match Discord Server Nicknames across the board, but only for the purposes of private messages as defined by the keyword. You can still have the option of using the Private Messaging system on BN if you don’t want to change your Server Nickname for the BlogNomic Discord server.

Additionally, a dynastic rule could also allow Discord private messaging without changing Server Nickname. The changes are only regarding the default state.

Given how many dynasties apparently deliberately dodge the “private message” keyword by using a different term and relying on plain English usage (this dynasty already has “privately send a message” in another rule; last dynasty had “may privately request”), I think it might be better to just drop the definition and fall back to plain English as the default.

Plain English allows philosophical (and I think unlikely to succeed) scams that hinge on argued interpretations of what “private” and “message” and “send” actually mean. A stricter “matches their respective usernames” definition still has room for the philosophical stuff (“what does it really mean for two names to match?”), but also very explicitly allows more concrete ones (“I changed my Discord name to Keven for a few seconds while sending that message, so it wasn’t a valid pledge and I don’t have to honour it”).

I am in favour of requiring Discord names of active players to match (or be very plainly similar to) their blog ones, though. It seems useful for everyone to know who they’re talking to, and what names to type if they want to ping a question at someone or reach out to make a private deal.

If we were to require Discord names to match active players, perhaps that should be tied to communication specifically in Discord DMs and the #current-dynasty channel. People who go idle should be free to be known as some other name while chatting in the many other non-dynasty channels.

Regarding the “I changed my Discord name to Keven for a few seconds while sending that message, so it wasn’t a valid pledge and I don’t have to honour it”, that should be covered by the Fair Play rule, shouldn’t it? If you impersonate someone else, you may have played by the keyword rule, but you violated the Fair Play rule, and thus are subject to its consequences.

I honestly don’t like the name matching, makes things a bit too formal in my opinion

and we can just define the term “private communication” instead of doing this (No Private Communication already has a pretty apt description we could just lift from there)

[Jonathan] That was just an example of the general principle, rather than the one weird trick that breaks your rule. If a rule is written in simple, general terms, then exploits have to rely on unexpected interpretations of basic words, which is hard to get past a group who weren’t interpreting them that way. The more specifically you define a concept and bring it into the light, the more persuasive traction an exploit can get.

And it’s accidents as much as scams. Saying that a non-matching username invalidates a private message isn’t completely intuitive, and is likely to set us up for a future endgame breakdown where an Emperor accepts a bunch of private game orders that they shouldn’t have.