BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

“forward is considered Pending” should be “forward it is considered Pending”.

There’s a much bigger issue, though; this accidentally repeals the part of the rule where proposals actually change the ruleset and gamestate. Your second blockquote should be something like “When a Proposal is Enacted, it changes the Gamestate and/or Ruleset as specified, and the enacting Admin must change the gamestate-tracking entities accordingly.”

I think much of this can be simplified to “the Status field of a votable matter post in the blog software is used to track the votable matter’s Status”, rather than trying to duplicate the rules for what it means to be “tracked”.

I think that instead of saying “legally applying any status resolves the post” – which still runs the risk of queue blockages if a status is applied illegally – it’s probably safe to allow admins to enact any proposal if it’s the oldest proposal with a blog-software status of none/pending. That’s scammable (in a fairly obvious way), but attempting the scam would violate Fair Play two different ways.

I also think the blanket uphold shouldn’t be in a proposal – the sort of issue it’s trying to fix would likely affect this proposal too, just making it harder to figure out what happened, so any fix should be in a CFJ rather than a proposal.

Oh, actually you really need to remove the blanket uphold. There were several attempts in BlogNomic’s early history to get wins by illegally enacting DoVs, and as far as I can tell, upholding them would make those wins actually work.

I believe that it is tracked, even if it’s not explicit where it is tracked, by virtue of:

“Votable Matters and other official posts, as well as specific gamestate information, shall be tracked by the BlogNomic blog at http://blognomic.com”

In the same way that we don’t need to specify where on the wiki doc the “Last Power Action” or the “Room Legend” should be tracked, yet it is tracked there, we don’t need to specify where on the BN site Pending/Enacted/etc status is tracked either.

We could be more specific about it, sure, but I don’t believe it’s currently untracked.

Also, this would need the [Core] tag.

@ais

There’s a much bigger issue, though; this accidentally repeals the part of the rule where proposals actually change the ruleset and gamestate. Your second blockquote should be something like “When a Proposal is Enacted, it changes the Gamestate and/or Ruleset as specified, and the enacting Admin must change the gamestate-tracking entities accordingly.”

It doesn’t - check the last quote box

@Cuddlebeam

It doesn’t need a Core tag… check the rule Tags…

Tags can be implied by the proposal body nowadays (if you mention a core rule by name, or say that you’re amending a core rule, it works).

I agree with you that it isn’t currently untracked, but not everyone agrees, so it would help to avoid arguments to have an explicit statement in the rules of “yes, it is tracked, and this is where”.

Oh! That’s new. Alright.

@Josh: I’m not sufficiently convinced that this makes the changes all at once (or indeed, that it gives the admin in question permission to override dynasty-specific restrictions against taking actions) – with that wording, I’d expect a proposal “set Jumble’s Puissance to 5” to fail to change Jumble’s Puissance if he were dusted and adminning it (because it attributes the change to the admin, and dusted players can’t increase their own Puissances).

It probably also makes Kevan’s “I’m going to enact this proposal in a weird order and DoV in the middle of enacting it, at a moment when I’m instantaneously winning” scam work again.

Making “Vetoed” a proposal status is good, but short-circuits itself as written because “Vetoed” is already defined as a pending proposal which has had a vote of veto cast on it (“when the Richardo von Nestor casts a vote of VETO on a Proposal, this renders the Proposal Vetoed”).

Illegal seems unnecessary to me - if something renders a proposal Illegal then to my eyes it just vanishes from the game universe and its grey-square blog status means “this looks like a proposal but it isn’t”, rather than it remaining in play as “an Illegal Proposal” that we can still theoretically interact with. But I know we’ve expressed different takes on that in the past.

The existing Resolution keyword would need redefining from “perform the act, as an Admin, of enacting or failing a Votable Matter” to include Veto-stamping and Illegalifying, otherwise a proposal that “remains Pending until it is Resolved” can never be Veto-stamped or Illegalified.

I think this needs more wiring if we’re now saying that a closed-as-Vetoed proposal is different from a Failed proposal: “Resolution of Proposals” says that something that’s been vetoed gets “Failed by any Admin”, so would end up with the wrong status. I guess we need a more general “vetoed means failed” clarification somewhere, given common proposal clauses like “if proposal X failed, this proposal has no effect”, which we shouldn’t have to write as “failed or was vetoed”.

Is the change from “This rule cannot be overruled by Dynastic Rules” to “by any other rule” a necessary moving part of this, or just something that seemed an obvious fix?

And more generally, the dense “application of any status through the blog post editing form is sufficient to consider…” stuff seems too into-the-weeds for core - could we make this a “Status” section of Clarifications? I think it’s important that Core remains something that every player (and potential player) can reasonably read and understand the thinking behind, without getting into philosophical minutiae of error handling which even an unidling admin would blink at.

I think it makes sense for Failed, Vetoed and Illegal to all be synonyms in terms of proposal status (with the caveat that if a post is not a proposal at all, the Illegal mark doesn’t necessarily say it’s a proposal, it just says that if it’s a proposal it’s been failed).

If the status of the post is to be meaningful then the different statuses should be acknowledged in the ruleset, otherwise we have “this post has the vetoed status but that doesn’t exist in the ruleset” forever.

@Kevan - I acknowledge the philosophical disagreement re illegal posts but the ruleset currently contains

“Any post that is or is made illegal as a result of an infraction against any of the prohibitions set out in this rule continues to be an Official Post but may no longer have any effect on the ruleset or the gamestate”

While that’s there we should at least be consistent.

I’m going to take another pass at this now - will comment again when editing is done. Thanks for input, all.

Okay, so edits. I’ve:

* Got rid of the failed/vetoed distinction - I’ve allowed that it’s a separate status for the status field but not that it’s distinct from failed - I think that creates more problems that it solves
*Shunted some of the harder work to the Resolve/Resolution entry of the appendix
* Got rid of the Uphold Everything rider; I think we agreed last night that the dynastic uphold mechanism worked so that’s probably fine anyway

This is a definite improvement on what’s there at the moment, and I plan to vote for it.

The “continues to be an Official Post” clause only applies to votable matters which become illegal, Rodlen-style; not to failed attempts to create votable matters, so I guess we’ll see if that ever comes to a crunch. (Someone trying to post a third pending proposal doesn’t, I think, create an “Illegal Proposal” which counts towards their proposals made that day and so on: they just fail to do anything. I’d assumed that’s how we’ve been playing it with third proposals, but I guess the situation of someone trying to make a “fourth” proposal in the same day has probably never come up.)

“A votable matter may not be resolved except as directed by the ruleset” would already be covered by “The Ruleset and Gamestate can only be altered in manners specified by the Ruleset”, I’d hope?

Is the “status of a resolved votable matter, once resolved, is determined by the votes cast upon it” bit necessary? That an aspect of the game is determined by whatever rules led up to it, rather than someone’s mistaken declaration about it, doesn’t seem like something we need to say. (And being this specific about it could trip us up: if a CfJ includes the instruction to “fail proposal X”, as they often do, what happens to that proposal’s status if it had a quorum of votes in favour?)

I’d still like to know why “This rule cannot be overruled by any other rule” is here (where the current rule restricts that to dynastic). Is it a necessary moving part? It feels odd to say “this core rule can’t be overruled by other core rules”, as if the core rules maybe haven’t been written properly and don’t trust each other.

@Kevan:

Is the “status of a resolved votable matter, once resolved, is determined by the votes cast upon it” bit necessary?

Only a little: it’s there to confirm that, if a proposal is resolved incorrectly and set into the wrong status, it’s still resolved and hasn’t had interminate status due to the resolution being improperly carried out. It’s unlikely to ever be a problem that the status of a proposal is ultimately down to the votes cast, and everything else stems from that.

I’d still like to know why “This rule cannot be overruled by any other rule” is here

That’s a callback to Cuddlebeam’s scam of putting a rule into the appendix that affected the resolution of proposals. No good reason to exempt any part of the ruleset; we never really want resolution, particularly of CfJs, to be undermined inadvertantly by appendix entries.

  We smack each other in the slack, and we don’t print retractions.

sure! this is a lot to read but it seems fine

“A votable matter may not be resolved except as directed by the ruleset, and the status of a resolved votable matter, once resolved, is determined by the votes cast upon it, as assessed by the rules that govern the specific kind of votable matter (as well as any other considerations regarding the legality of the votable matter, such as the stipulations put forward in the Appendix rule Official Posts).” just dissolves into a redundant soup of “Don’t break rules, statuses are determined by the rules, as written in those rules (also possibly some other rules).” for me. Rules rules rules. We know all this already, Rule 1.1 has got us covered.

So “fail proposal X if it is pending” CfJs clauses will still work because they’re covered by “as well as any other considerations”?