BlogNomic: The Ninth Dynasty of ais523

The proposal has timed out, but it doesn’t take effect until it’s actually in the ruleset. Life would be a little chaotic otherwise.

I’ll clear the queue now that I’m back online - feel free to make a legal Eject when I’ve done that. (This post doesn’t - as I see it - do anything, because it isn’t one of “such posts” which “any Survivor may make”, it was just a post made with a particular title, prior to the rule existing.)

Actually, I can just post one myself, of course.

Ah, interesting… doesn’t matter in this case, but doesn’t that ever cause problems where the game’s strategy is significantly disturbed by the question of when an admin will next log on? Indeed, are admins even obliged to process things when they log on?

(The “uncertain” flags are bad enough for that - already cost me a Sanity being unable to eat my jam and biscuits in case I was imagining them!)

No, admins aren’t obliged to do anything. And yes, somebody once won a dynasty by choosing not to process a ready-to-enact proposal that, if it was enacted, would have prevented them from winning. Legislating to enforce selflessness would be very tricky, though (and could obstruct basic strategy so much that people would just decide, on balance, not to become admins), so it’s easier just to bear in mind that admins might decide to serve their own ends, given the opportunity.

It’s a bit problematic when there are only one or two active admins, though, and we could do with a few more. The only reason we don’t make everyone an admin is that a confused or malicious player could mess things up quite badly given access to the “delete or edit any post” buttons. (We lost four years of Blogspot archives when a careless admin went to delete his Blogger account a couple of years later and didn’t really think about “are you sure you want to delete your Blogger account and all blogs you moderate?”)

Legislation to enforce selflessness wasn’t what I had in mind. Rather, make proposals enact systematically so that the window before an admin processes one has no rule effect and simply obliges slightly more alertness from the players. (Such rules are pretty easy to spot, since they’re always bright red in the sidebar.)

I’m in favour of such a change and I don’t know why we don’t already have that rule.

Allowing any player to add some sort of “closing comment” and update the ruleset and GNDT to include the full effects of the proposal should work, with an admin formally closing it when they see it. (It won’t work for proposals that change other aspects of the gamestate, like players’ names or the sidebar contents, but they’re rare enough to work as exceptions.)

What about just considering the change to have been applied to the gamestate as soon as the proposal can be enacted?

An admin can come along later and make the wiki article and other gamestate trackers reflect the actual gamestate.

Yup, that makes more sense to me. That way a proposal cannot end up in a weird state of having been partly applied.

Not really sure about the enacting proposals thing, but my two cents on why an admin can’t exploit their privileges for advantage:

Rule 1.9 states:

“A Survivor should not deliberately exploit bugs or unexpected behaviours in the software running the game (ExpressionEngine, MediaWiki or the GNDT).”

This may not include the website management, but I would say that Admins enacting proposals at specific times counts as “exploitation of unexpected behaviours”.

Surely not, because either the behaviours are expected (the software does not enact the proposals without help from the admin) or the behaviours are not “in the software” (because the admin is not themselves “software running the game”).

[Ienpw] It seems unnecessarily messy to have two versions of the gamestate; one recorded in the wiki and the GNDT, and the other floating around nowhere but possible to assemble by paging through proposals to see which of them have been “enacted” by non-admins. Everyone can edit the wiki, everyone can edit the GNDT, everyone can add a comment saying “this proposal has passed/failed, stop voting” - the only thing we really need admins to do is to switch the proposal state from “open” to “passed/failed”, which gives it an icon and stops it from appearing in the sidebar.