I object to one sentence here, which I feel goes against all of Blognomic’s traditions: “All Administrators are requested, on their honour, to avoid using the power that Admin status grants to gain in-game advantage.”

First of all, there is an inherant conflict of interest, and will cause great discomfort and probably ultimately be disregarded.

Second, using admin status for gain is part of Blognomic’s rich tradition.  For most of Blognomic history, there has been a point reward for adminning proposals.  Also, there are several cases where admins have used their powers to achieve victory.  Such victories have been well accepted (see Kevan’s DoV in the First Dynasty of Geran). Not once has there been a proposal to remove an Admin from power because they [ab]used their powers to win.  Our admins work hard to keep Blognomic running smoothly, and should be rewarded for doing so.

Finally, on an unrelated note, having another type of official voteable post in the core ruleset will probably open up new scams.

grrrr

Why the hate?

Bucky: The reward for adminning proposals wasn’t there for an in-game advantage, but as a motivation for admins to admin proposals, which as you know, requires some degree of effort that would otherwise go unrewarded. It wasn’t an active advantage, but more of a latent motivation.

But the fact that the reward is no longer given proves that Blognomic admins no longer are to use their status for explicit gain.

Kevan’s DoV in the First Dynasty of Geran was an unusual case. However, no one had voted in ten days!!!!! So are you seriously going to say that it was his admin powers that won him the dynasty? Though that might have helped, I think it was checking Blognomic more often than the other players that allowed victory.

The “in-game advantage” thing seems quite vague and paralysing - can I vote immediately before failing something, or should I only do one of those things? Am I allowed to enact my own proposals when they reach quorum, or is that an “in-game advantage”? (They might fail if I waited longer and someone changed their vote.) Is it okay to add a new player to the game if they’re my friend and might help me? If you’ve got a problem with any of the current admin powers, just propose to fix them in an unambiguous way.

And the Superadmin thing seems a category error, like assigning specific people to be in charge of providing and maintaining the furniture in a tabletop Nomic. Server changes aren’t allowed to influence the gamestate, so it’s fine for the owner of the server to decide who does and doesn’t get access to it, to bring their (non-player) friends in to upgrade the blog engine or debug a script. Making it a part of the game seems like a terrible idea; it arguably turns the server into gamestate and prevents non-players (or Idle experts) from doing anything to it, and I assume we’d disallow it if an unknown new player pulled a scam to become a Superadmin and demanded our server’s root password.

It’d maybe be useful to have a page on the wiki somewhere explaining who owns the server and how to contact them if you want to implement a new script, but this doesn’t need to be part of the core ruleset.

I will say that the unanimous vote requirement for Superadmins worries me, since it seems like it could make it impossible for new Superadmins to be created, but I certainly agree with the spirit of this proposal and if something like that becomes a real problem we can tweak it later.

Blessings

Need I mention scammability?

The language seems good to me. I’m not entirely convinced that we need to have the duties and responsibilities of the superadmins explicitly described in the ruleset, but I am in favor of the proposal otherwise.

Particularly, the line:

“All Administrators are requested, on their honour, to avoid using the power that Admin status grants to gain in-game advantage.”

seems very nice to me, but that’s my opinion. Following Kevan’s objections, perhaps we should re-word that line to something like

’ avoid using the power that Admin status grants stricly to gain an in-game advantage.’

or some such kludgery.

Otherwise I’m inclined to say that it is very good. Bucky, would you please describe the scams that you are alluding to?

“In-game advantage” still seems vague, I think “strictly” just makes it more meaningless.

If I see that a proposal that I didn’t like has timed out and passed, is it advantage-gaining if I decide not to enact it immediately (in case it gets some more votes)? Do admins need to become impassionate robots who can tell exactly how they’d have acted in a parallel situation which had no personal relevance?

I know “requested, on their honour”  is toothless, but presumably any admin who makes a DoV that involved any passing usage of admin powers is going to have that victory unpredictably rejected. This sounds a bit like a reason not to be an admin.

I’m not sure about Bucky’s scam, but moving the promotion system out of proposals and into a new, differently-regulated process seems like a pointlessly dangerous thing to do. (Off the top of my head, the Motion system doesn’t have the “ignore all but the last vote” clause that Proposals have, nor any limit on the number you can make - if you submit a hundred, maybe people won’t bother voting against all of them.)

This proposal could just have a clause saying that Admin promotion Proposals have no effect if more than a third of their votes were AGAINST.

I wanted to move them out of the Proposal system to restrit votes in different ways, i.e. to admin only for Superadmins, but I agree this needs a re-work.  If it doesn’t attract some more votes in the near future, I’ll S-K and re-work, else I’ll amend after enactment.

Kevan spotted one of them, the multiple vote problem.  The other problem is that it does not define a boundary between a motion to become an admin and a generic motion (which presumably exists) which could lead to some interesting scams if we ever decide to use motion for something else.

Also, if you want to become an Admin, submitting a Motion at every opportunity would be mandatory.

I think “A keyword defined by a rule supersedes the normal English usage of the word.” would catch the generic motion thing.

S-K.  I’ll resubmit when I get a minute: I’m going away for the weekend.

Anybody else, feel free to submit a revised version.