If he cast the vote before you marked it as having enacted, then the proposal was still pending and the vote was legal.

It would set an odd precedent to say otherwise. Any admin would be able to silently “start adminning” a proposal when it had reached quorum, without actually doing anything, and then come back hours or days later to overrule any CoVs or vetoes that had been made since.

per Kevan.

@kevan: However this was not the case, I counted the votes, wrote my admin comment, copied the rules to the wiki and marked it as enacted.

If that is not what adminning is, I don’t know what I’ve been doing the past two years, then.

@arth - Once a proposal is adminned, it’s impossible to comment or vote on it. It’s a long fluke that someone voted while you were going through the steps - this is the first time it’s happened to my knowledge - but until the proposal is marked as enacted to the blog - i.e. it’s enacted in the gamestate - it remains open for voting. The admin starting the process of enactment is not a sensible point of delineation upon which to base the rule, for the reasons that Kevan gives.

@josh: You haven’t being around too often, but yes it has happened. However, this particular time it caused the proposal to fail, because of the state of the proposal (being 5-4 on timeout).

Furthermore, everything you’re explaining has absolutely no rules grounding, none of what you say is explained in the ruleset! Please read the ruleset before commenting.

@arth - your high-handedness was cute but I wasn’t making a comment on the ruleset. I was describing an actual reality - the act of marking the proposal as passed and the act of closing it for voting are concurrent, in as much as pressing the “update” button in the blog software is the exact action which makes it impossible to cast further votes on the proposal. As the act of commencing the enactment of a proposal is untrackable and unverifiable, the former is the more sensible point of delineation than the latter.

It isn’t adminned until the ability to comment goes away, that’s the only sensible way to do it. As an admin, you should first update the post to “Enacted,” then make the relevant changes to the Ruleset/Gamestate in order to avoid this problem.

It’s true that the enactment process is a little opaque, and that it could use a rewrite. Personally, I’ve always updated the blog entry before updating the ruleset and GNDT, primarily to avoid the chance that another admin will pick the same proposal up while I’m working on it.

If we wanted to be completely watertight, I suppose the admin process should be something like:-

* Count the votes.
* Mark the proposal as passed or failed or vetoed, with a comment of “Passed 10 to 4. Being processed by AdminName…” - this is the point at which the proposal stops being Pending.
* Update the ruleset and GNDT.
* Edit the admin comment to “Passed X to Y. Enacted by AdminName.”

@josh: The ruleset should said so then. Until someone makes a CfJ to make the ruleset read like you imply, my point stands and your opinion is simply unbased. Why don’t you go ahead and propose that clarification? I’d heartily agree to vote FOR on it.

@kevan: Like I said to josh, go ahead and propose that fix then, until then, my point still stands, even if it goes against your “common sense”.

@arth - Your position has no ruleset basis either; the ruleset is, in fact, quite vague on this issue. Thus, by your own logic, your point does not stand and your CfJ is as unbased as my opinion. As that is the case, I’m voting for the most sensible resolution. Yours is not it.

I’m not in favor of the “being processed” thing. A better fix would just be an explicit definition of “adminned” as being “whenever the Proposal is closed for voting.” That way, the Proposal has been enacted from the moment it was closed, and is treated as part of the Ruleset (even though it may take a few minutes before it can be physically added to the Ruleset).

Wow, this is a difficult one. Really, I’d prefer to fix this with a proposal that alters the core rules to explain exactly when a proposal is adminned. The issue seems to be this: a proposal can be enacted if it’s pending, and meets one of two conditions (quorumed or timed out). Once a proposal is enacted, it ceases to be pending, and therefore cannot be failed without a proposal or CFJ that explicitly fails it. The ruleset seems clear that there are two stages involved: the proposal becomes Enacted, then the admin can (and must) change the ruleset and gamestate according to what the proposal specifies. As a result, it seems that any changes to the ruleset and/or gamestate are illegal until the proposal is actually enacted.

In BlogNomic, there’s no need to announce an action, like there is in many other nomics (e.g. in Agora, to enact a proposal you have to send an email saying you do so); you just do it, and hope other people notice the resulting gamestate changes. (Rules sometimes require specific words in comments or post titles in order to make this process clearer.) The question here, therefore, is about whether arth’s ruleset changes platonically enacted the proposal, or not. Due to the way BlogNomic tracks gamestate, it seems to make the most sense to say that a proposal is enacted if it has a green tick sign next to its title (unless it was enacted illegally), and not enacted otherwise; therefore, if Excalabur’s vote happened before arth updated the category of the proposal (I’m not an admin so can’t check, but think this is the case), then Excalabur’s vote was legal and arth couldn’t then enact it, because the conditions weren’t met. Therefore, .

@josh: My position has quite a basis, if you read rule “1.5 Enactment”:

The oldest pending Proposal may be enacted by any Admin (and the Ruleset and/or Gamestate updated to include the specified effects of that Proposal) if either of the following is true: etc etc…

Then, after the conditions it says:

Whenever an Admin marks a proposal, CfJ, or DoV as passed or failed, he must also mark his name, and report the final tally of votes (or the fact that it was self-killed or vetoed).

If I follow the rules in the order they are WRITTEN, I could not have marked the proposal until I was done with the ruleset changes!

Or am I supposed to do I actually have to carry those actions in the opposite order? That’s not sensible.

@arth - a valid interpretation, but not a definitive one. Just because the rule is written in an order, doesn’t mean that they describe a rigid chronology. Your opinion of the ruleset is certainly not proscribed by it.

But on the subject of sensible: you say that you started adminning the proposal before Excalabur voted on it. Prove it. If you can do so then I will change my vote.

@josh: Would you like to set the precedent that rules instructions can be carried in any order? Seriously, man. Are you willing to acknowledge that ridiculous notion simply to win the argument?

Your second point is moot also, because EE doesn’t log that information. You are asking for a proof that cannot exist because there is no way to obtain it. If you wanted to be sensible I could offer this: EE shows that I admined the proposal at 2009-10-13 10:38 PM and Excalabur voted at 2009-10-13 10:38 PM; clearly two minutes is a reasonable amount of time to process a proposal.

Its silly to hold the rules to a standard that is specified nowhere. Do we have to take actions in a Rule numbered 2.5 before those in a Rule numbered 2.13 simply because they came first in the Ruleset? I think not.

Do I want to avoid enforcing an arbitrary restruction on proposals that has no actual purpose? Do I want to avoid the anarchy of forcing a chronological order on the ruleset that has never existed before? Do I want you do stop being so condescending? Yes, I seriously do, “man”.

You have made my second point for me quite adequately, I feel. You want to base the ruleset on an unprovable. Heaven forbid that someone should want to base precident on a “ridiculous notion”.

@josh: Ok, I’ll concede that my notion is ridiculous if you can accept that the order the text as it appears in rules is important.

Otherwise, you’re simply saying “time is irrelevant, do everything in whatever order anyone wants” which is not a constructive interpretation of the rules.

Or, we could use the more commonplace - and common sense - convention, under which people use words like “before”, “after”, “then” and their ilk to denote temporal relationships between actions described in rules. We have this lovely language; we might as well use it, no?

@josh: Uhm, are you blaming me for the fact that rule 1.5 Enactment does not contain that language? Or does you common sense convention include us “imagining” those words are written there, even if they aren’t?

Oh, for one glorious moment we moved away from condescesion; how I hoped it would last, and how naive I was.

I’m not “blaming” you for anything. I’m voting against your CfJ because the rules don’t support it, per your last comment. Given that your argument seems to rely on a temporal relationship existing, that last comment seems increasingly hypocritical.

Are we done here?

None of you comments seem to resolve the issue that is being brought up about the lack of ordering in the enactment rules.

Meanwhile, I have actually proposed those changes. I don’t blame you, criticizing me is easier than actually trying to improve things.

You’re sneering because he was spending his time answering your questions? Are you hoping that something dramatic will happen when you’ve successfully insulted a full quorum of players?

It’s how you unlock the secret proposal mode.

@josh: lol

@kevan: I like stacking the odds against myself. More fun that way.

By the way, I just started to admin this.  On the off-chance that it passes, I’ll finish failing it because its precedent states that votes placed in the meantime don’t count.