I wasn’t around last dynasty to see what happened but seems fine to me

don’t think it is “starting”, should be something akin to “working”?

Or “using”? Let me try that and see how it looks to everyone…

This still triggers the “Once a Votable Matter has been enacted, it can have no further direct effect on the gamestate” deadlock.

[Bucky] That was already the case, though, wasn’t it? Is your argument that the act of “enacting” includes changing the gamestate?

Would be good to get a summary of what this is fixing and how, for the sake of voters who weren’t present at the end of the last dynasty.

Sure. Basically the resolving proposal of the dynasty required the enacting admin to make a list of citizens based on the population of each city, randomly select one, and the owner of the selected citizen achieved victory. The making of the list wasn’t tracked anywhere so the argument hinged on when making that list took place, which ended up being definitive as the contents of the list would be changed by a dynastic action that took place 5 seconds after the enactment of the proposal. The ruleset currently has ‘resolution’ of a proposal as being the act of marking the proposal as resolved in the admin form; applying its effect is a separate step, non-atomic, so there is an airgap in which things can happen.

This enshrines that enactment affects the ruleset and gamestate as it was at the moment of enactment. It creates some new problems (what happens now if something happens in the airgap?) but I think it’s worth trying out.

thanks for the summary! i think the added sentence is a bit clunky, but i can see the point of it.

So this is implicitly endorsing the (I think unwritten) idea that the enactment process is “mark proposal as enacted, then apply its proposed changes”, rather than the other way around?

I’ve always done it the other way around so that another admin won’t start enacting the subsequent proposal as “oldest pending” before I’ve finished applying all the effects of the first one.

How does “using the gamestate as it was” actually shake out, if two admins can exploit the post-marked airgap to apply the effect of two adjacent proposals out of order?

Brendan has 5 points; I mark “double Brendan’s points” as enacted; you then mark “Brendan gains +10 points” as enacted; you process the second proposal and set Brendan’s points to 15; I process the first proposal and set Brendan’s points to 10. Brendan’s points should have been 20 as a result of those two proposals, but are… 10?

The order is actually currently largely written: we have

A votable matter is resolved by an admin setting its status through use of the “status” field in the blog post editing form

And then

When a Proposal is Enacted, its stated effects are immediately applied in full

Which at the very least implies a strong causality.

You are right that this change leaves potential exploitations in place, and creates new ones.

for creating new exploits, then.

Checking where I might have gotten the process-then-status enactment idea from, the ruleset did previously define enaction as “updating the Ruleset and/or Gamestate to include the specified effects of that Proposal, and then setting that Proposal’s status to Enacted”, until July 2021.

[Kevan] Can you explain why the exploit would not be covered under Fair Play?

Which part of Fair Play do you mean?

A person with administrative, moderation, or other heightened access to the software running or supporting BlogNomic should not take any action using such heightened access for the purpose of causing any Mindjacker or Mindjackers to gain, receive, maintain, or preserve gameplay advantage

In my mind, that should generally prevent the type of exploit described as “if two admins can exploit the post-marked airgap to apply the effect of two adjacent proposals out of order”, shouldn’t it?

I don’t think that applies to in-game admin advantage, nor was it intended to, since the rule goes on to say:

...unless any of the following is true:
* Such action is required or explicitly permitted by the rules…

“Administrative” is perhaps an unfortunate choice of word.

Admin advantage is certainly alive and well - Bucky’s “last second growth tick” before enacting a proposal at the end of the last dynasty didn’t appear to get a blink from anyone.

ahh yeah.  on additional info

CoV based on previous discussion

Withdrawn based on a better understanding of the Fair Play rules