Still not entirely sure how brevity would play out, but it probably should change.

  but this proposal has been accidentally rendered illegal. Maldor’s vote was 17:48, and revision 3’s timestamp was at 17:49.

@Maldor: please try not to vote on a Proposal until at least 4 hours after it is posted. There’s an edit window during this time where the author can fix issues with their Proposal as long as there is no vote on it yet.

(Unless I’m reading the timestamps wrong. I can’t remember if edit timestamps are in local time or not. I’d probably better check.)

That’s my bad, I misinterpreted the proposal listing as anything at the bottom was older than the top

Okay, false alarm. The proposal was edited 4 minutes after creation. Maldor’s vote occurred an hour after creation. It’s just general blognomic timestamp weirdness that confused me.

I don’t like this being at the Emperor’s discretion; I don’t think that this solves any edge-case issues and in any case I don’t think those edge case issues matter much (if all else fails the decision on whether or not a proposal adds a compliant or non-compliant number of words to the ruleset can be resolved at the moment of enactment, when it is not ambiguous).

everyone else has proven more reliable at counting characters than me anyway, and i’m not sure that this should be a ‘should’.

I think the point is that if it’s a concrete declaration like “this can never be popular”, then it runs the risk of breaking everything if one slips through with too many characters. Everything that’s done with the expectation that the proposal is correct would need to be rolled back.

A “should” means that if one slips through, it doesn’t matter.

right, but if something does get enacted falsely, it should be easy for us to catch quickly by checking the revision history page and looking for a green (+400) anywhere. i’m making a habit of checking that intermittently, and if a few other folks are too then i’d be very surprised if something actually slipped past for any meaningful amount of time.