My one worry about this is that it might be somewhat tricky to remember at times if someone idled in the previous dynasty, but it’s probably not a critical issue; if someone is idled after 7 days instead of 4, it’s not the end of the world.

A mistake in the other direction though could be kind of tricky. If someone misremembers when a player was idled, that could lead to an invalid change in quorum, which could lead to a whole host of proposals being processed early. It would admittedly be on the admin to double-check though.

Mistakes can always happen; an admin can illegally idle or unidle somebody, illegally close a proposal or miscount its votes, with similar knock-on consequences. We shouldn’t be afraid to change core for fear of that.

Like you say, though, this only goes in one direction. It’s an optional extra rule that an admin can choose to invoke; an admin who forgets all about it just won’t apply any four-day idles, and won’t be breaking any rules by not doing so.

I’d also expect admins to mention the reason for a quicker idling when it happened, so other players (including the idled one) would be able to double-check as well.

Sure, sounds good to me. 

From idle, a couple of observations:

1) Kevan, you’re best placed to answer this: will your idle-player tool be able to accommodate this change?

2) ‘Subsequent’ (as in, ‘current and subsequent dynasty’) doesn’t really only mean ‘immediately succeeding’. Miriam-Webster gives ‘following in time, order, or place’, wiktionary gives ‘Following in time; coming or being after something else at any time, indefinitely’. The use of the definite article helps a little but I do not think that this is a precise enough use of the word to definitively state that the counter-reading (i.e. that any dynasty after the offending dynasty is ‘subsequent’ and thus that any player who has ever timed out is on a 4-day time out forever) is a core rules scam.

3) ‘[T]he 168 Hour idle timeout’ is only really declarative enough because there’s no other 168 hour clocks in the ruleset; the concept of an ‘idle timeout’ would just as easily apply to, or possibly even more appropriately apply to, eg, ‘An Admin may Unidle a Runner [...] unless the Runner who would be Unidled asked to become (or rendered themselves) Idle within the past 96 hours (4 days)’.

In general I approve of the general thrust of this and think that only #2 is a serious issue, but I do think that #2 is a serious issue that should be patched immediately at the very least.

1) Not to the extent of being able to detect which players have been idled recently. I could add an additional colour for players in the 4-7 day window if that seemed useful, although it would be redundant in most cases.

2) True enough. I suppose we have at least one full dynasty to patch that.

3) That was the intention, but I’ll bear in mind an “in the previous sentence” for a patch.