I think it’s debatable whether the list item is part of the same sentence as the introduction to the list. (Compare the comparable situation in Heists, which has multiple list items with full stops at the end.)

This at least needs an uphold/reject CFJ because if we are mistaken about whether the action was legal or not, it may cause the dynasty to be unable to end correctly, because if it causes the tracker to be wrong, it could potentially lead to a DoV being illegally posted without anyone realising.

I give my tentative congratulations for a battle potentially well fought, in line with my obligations should the triumphs turn out to be legal.

@SingularByte: this post is a trap, it isn’t the “official” Triumph report post (it doesn’t specify a change to Participant’s Triumphs), so commenting on it doesn’t do anything. You’ll have to look out for the post (if and when Josh makes it — legally it’s only a recommendation, not a requirement) and congratulate on that.

Thinking about it, if the rule said “following” rather than “folkowing” it would clearly all be one sentence (although there is some interesting ambiguity in some of the other rules), as the list would clearly be incorporated into the sentence.

With a meaningless “folkowing” it is less clear, although I’m still leaning towards thinking that it’s all a single sentence.

(Actually I have no idea how to rule on an action whose definition contains a meaningless word – can the “folkowing conditions” ever be satisfied? I can see an argument that there are no folkowing conditions because the term is undefined, but I don’t know whether that means that they’re vacuously complied with or vacuously violated.)

@ais (unrelated to the sentence debacle), I think that ‘folkowing’ is close enough to ‘following’ that it’s reasonable to interpret it in that way in absence of another obvious meaning - we may not be able to correct typos but we can still clearly make out the original meaning. Compare <a >last dynasty</a>, where “thr [sic] Finish Line at 100 cm” didn’t stop us from recognizing the existence of the finish line.

Naturally the issue then becomes where exactly we draw the line between “nope, I can’t see the original meaning” and “yep, I get what you meant”, which I imagine can only be determined through CfJ

Whoops, had a malformed link there, here it is

It seems reasonably natural, looking at the rule in isolation, to interpret “folkowing” as a BlogNomic-specific adjective that is defined by the ruleset. The problem is that the ruleset doesn’t actually define it, but that hasn’t stopped us from placing dependencies on undefined words into the ruleset in the past, typically expecting them to be defined later and unachievable until that point.

I don’t know if I’d agree there. Usually when we place an undefined word in the ruleset there’s clearly no other thing that undefined word could mean, but ‘folkowing’ just so happens to be one letter away from ‘following’, and ‘following’ happens to work perfectly fine in the context of the sentence… it’s way easier for me to interpret that as a typo for ‘following’ than it is for me to arbitrarily guess that it must be some term that doesn’t appear anywhere else in the ruleset

Well, in the “thr” example, that’s an obvious typo that could, under the ruleset at the time, just be corrected.

In the current ruleset, we have a rule against correcting typos, and recent precedent that nonwords that were introduced into the ruleset intentionally aren’t typographical mistakes. That might affect the interpretation somewhat, but maybe it doesn’t!

We have precedent that they aren’t mistakes (in the accidental sense), but to me even an intentionally introduced error can be glossed over when we’re interpreting a rule if it’s clear enough what the meaning was supposed to be (much more readily, anyway, than deciding that this uniquely occurring, uncapitalized, non-English-word in a context that clearly suggests a sensible meaning is actually a definition of a new BlogNomic term).

I don’t think there is a “was supposed to be” involved – in particular, intentionally spelling a word weirdly could potentially be a way to clarify that it’s meant to have a definition independent of its original meaning (in a similar way to capitalising it). It doesn’t make sense to gloss over that.

For what it’s worth, another potential interpretation is as “folk owing”, with a missing space; “the folk owing conditions are all met” is a valid English subordinate clause that is grammatically correct (and would be quite hard to satisfy, given that “folk” doesn’t appear to be limited to BlogNomic players, and although owing conditions is a rare state for folk to be in, it isn’t completely unheard of, so the main issue would be figuring out the timing on “met”).

Right, but you have to consider the wider context of the game itself. When we read things, we generally try to make them make sense as much as possible (otherwise we wouldn’t get much of anywhere). It’d be disingenuous to interpret ‘folkowing’ as ‘folk owing’. Why would we, as BlogNomic players, care about a bunch of random folk? ‘following’ makes a whole lot more sense. For much the same reason, it’s a lot easier to imagine that ‘following’ is spelled really similarly to ‘folkowing’ because someone intentionally or otherwise put a letter in the wrong place than because it’s an intentional mechanism to differentiate the two words (which is unseen anywhere else in real life or in BlogNomic). I guess we might have to agree to disagree on this one, maybe your tolerance for error is just lower than mine.

I wrote my revised opinion on this in the CFJ (summary: I think the rule in question is all one sentence, which defines the set of 1 condition in question as the “folkowing condition” and applies it to Tools of the Trade actions).