If there is absolutely nothing else that a phrase can mean in the context of the ruleset, and if all alternate interpretations (“I have made a proposal titled Sugar, so I ‘have a Sugar’!”) would die a quick death at a CfJ or a DoV, then I think its meaning is sufficiently obvious to just play on.

Yeah, we are wading into the territory of constant CfJs over small wording quibbles in a way that isn’t really enjoyable to play.

to make this go away but honestly, we don’t need to do this every day.

I understand the concern but it’s a tad annoying for me too.

My basic problem is, suppose I make myself a Sugarcuber, and then after I build it, someone says “actually your Sugarcuber doesn’t work, so everything you’ve been doing is illegal”.

Wording arguments like this often fail at BlogNomic, but they also sometimes succeed (especially because in some cases, players vote based on what they want to be true rather than what they think actually is true). We don’t have much guidance yet about what is and isn’t acceptable in that regard.

As a consequence, it sometimes feels necessary to poll the players about “is this obvious” in advance, in order to gain certainty about the ruleset. To me, it’s fairly obvious that the Sugarcuber works, but I don’t know whether it would be obvious to everyone else without asking, and I’m occasionally very wrong about how the BlogNomic community as a whole will interpret a rule (especially as there doesn’t seem to be much of a tradition of going by the exact wording).

But when it turns out to be as obvious to everyone else as it is to me (as it seems to be in this case?), the CFJ ends up looking like a waste of time. I can’t know it was a waste of time until after I ask, though, because often the consensus unexpectedly turns out to be either the opposite of what I thought it would be, or else people deciding which way to vote on a CFJ based on what would be more beneficial for them, or what would stop a scam.

Maybe there should be some more lightweight mechanism for questions like this, or some more explicit guidelines about rule interpretation, or something like that – I’m not sure how to fix the issue. I would like to find a way to try to avoid this sort of CFJ. (My revert or uphold discussion was intended to help along these lines – if there was some point beyond which I could say “OK, so everyone’s playing as if this is working, and thus I can happily take actions that critically depend on everyone agreeing that this works”, there wouldn’t be much of a need to ask – I could just observe. But it hasn’t had enough participation to be confident about what people’s expectations here are.)

I understand ais, I’d also be wary. I’m just overall worn down from all of the CfJs.

I’d have said the existing mechanism to address this kind of worry would be a proposal - or, to be more confident about it, a rider on a proposal. A rival’s vote of “I actually think Sugar isn’t a Thing called Sugar, I don’t know what Sugar is, and I also want to keep it that way” would be a risky precedential boomerang for anyone to throw into the midgame with their name on it. And if you’re not completely out on a limb, the other Sugarcubers will be guaranteed to back you up.

… do we really need a cfj fit this????????,?,,

, bu please stop CFJs over stuff like this.