BlogNomic: Server outages hold up queues

Friday, April 01, 2011

Call for Judgment: Server outages hold up queues

Reached quorum with 11 votes in favour. Enacted by Kevan.

Adminned at 02 Apr 2011 08:45:15 UTC

To the end of rule 1.5 “Resolution of Proposals”, append

If a proposal somehow ends up being pending for more than 7 days, it is ignored for the purpose of calculating the oldest pending proposal, and can be failed by any Admin.

A fix for a potentially worrying consequence of the server issues. If someone accidentally adminned a proposal early due to server issues - which is entirely plausible to happen by mistake, and possibly nobody would notice or even know - then no proposals can be adminned from that point onwards. This fixes the problem, but has to be a CFJ not a proposal for what I hope are obvious reasons. This rulechange should unclog the queue both now, and in similar situations forever.

Comments

Kevan: he/him

01-04-2011 12:34:37 UTC

A fair enough long-term fix, but mightn’t we be better off moving away from trying to measure “open for voting” at all, given that we can’t ever really know how long a post has been open for voting? This fix still allows short-term confusion and scams.

ais523:

01-04-2011 12:59:00 UTC

I agree, I think. There are all sorts of other scams possible with the obvious alternatives, though, and I wanted to get a fix for the general problem (infinite queue stalling) into the ruleset, especially as I’ve tried and failed before; so I went for what was hopefully the least controversial option.

The real problem is the way BlogNomic shows the time that people started writing, not the time they finished writing. The time shown on proposals is always slightly earlier than the time they were actually submitted, and as I often have to look things up and revise things while writing a proposal, often tens of minutes. I’m not really sure what the obvious solution is to that.