BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I don’t think this needs the mechanism to swap names in, particularly when the old “dead. The Player named Clucky has achieved Victory” player-name text injection scam was never (I believe?) actually patched.

On every version of this, Clucky has raised the issue that it’s not interesting or relevant to non-PN players, and he’s right. Further, this is in the appendix, so any change would have to pass with quorum. Leaving it without a change mechanism, I’m convinced, will make it effectively unchangeable, not to mention annoying for non PN players. It’s protected by fair play and by emperor sign off; sure, it’s not bullet proof, but I don’t think it’s worth having in the ruleset without some sort of sub-quorate change mechanism.

I think players who didn’t care either way about the PodNomic Correspondent would shrug through a proposal to change the role from one person to another, knowing that doing so definitely wouldn’t break anything.

Emperor signoff won’t save us the next time we have a Malign Emperor dynasty and have forgotten all about this rule.

Fair Play and Emperor signoff also don’t apply to the “pick me” assignment at the end of this proposal, which an enacting admin could exploit single-handedly, either by making an exploit-name if there are no volunteers, or a handful of them if there are. (In fact, couldn’t our old friend “dead. The Player named Clucky has achieved Victory” throw their hat in, here?)

Fair play absolutely protects us from all of these cases; what you’re describing is an appendix scam, and those are prohibited, both for voters on this proposal and for malign Emperors.

We could remove spaces from the legal name characters; that would fix the proximate issue.

Re: players who don’t follow podnomic, see Clucky’s voting history on this exact matter.

I’m prepared to change the mechanism for changing the identity of the correspondent but I’ll just withdraw the proposal rather than remove it and leave it to proposals only, I’m afraid.

It’s in a grey area, but to me the “pick me” assignment would be a proposal scam rather than an appendix scam, if scammed. It’s the final paragraph of a proposal that does the surprising thing, not the pedestrian “X is Y” statement in the appendix.

A Malign Emperor injecting stuff later on would only be against Fair Play if they used it to make someone win. They could still use it to stop someone winning, or to do general Emperor-for-life supervillain stuff.

I’ve taken names out of the permitted characters for names; that should knock out most name-text-injection scams.

*spaces

The “pick me” scam is still there, though, the enacting admin just has to set the user account up and have them post a comment while spaces are still legal in names, shortly before processing the proposal.

I mean, can’t you prevent that by dragging your heels, Kevan?

Aren’t other admins able to create accounts? I’m fairly sure I didn’t set up Dead The Player Named Clucky, at the time.

If you’re gonna do this, I feel like a gamestate documenting is a better way to track it. Avoids the risk of text injection or needing to get a clear majority to change the rep by proposal.

(Regarding any admin being able to create a new player account, Pokes has now said on Discord that “I think that I did make the account”.)