This isn’t a Special Case rule that we’d want an Emperor to think about toggling on and off, is it? “TyGuy6” is also a silly name for a rule, it’s not much extra footprint to say “is tracked in the next sentence which is flavour text”.

Really I’d just go for a new subsection of “Gamestate Tracking” called something like “Internomic Gamestate”, with a single bullet point of “The player (or idle player) named TyGuy6 is BlogNomic’s PodNomic Correspondent.”

@Kevan I see the appeal of having the whole rule be inert flavour text unless we need to turn it on to change the identity of the person filling the role, and I also see the utility in having the Emperor be able to just flick it on if there’s a problem without having to go through the proposal process, given that (as Clucky points out) it affects a minority of players.

You’re right about the title, though, I’ll change that.

Do you have any thoughts on the Names addition? That strikes me as more far-reaching and serious than the PN admin, and I want to make sure it’s worded correctly.

The Emperor can’t toggle Special Cases rules at will, though, only upon Ascension.

The “and that name would be added to the ruleset” stuff feels a bit overspecific. It might be better all round to define what BlogNomic usernames can and can’t be: something like “can only contain letters, spaces and numbers”, or whatever a reasonable version of that would be, based on looking back over past player names. We can also formally include EE’s own rule that usernames can’t be fewer than four characters, and maybe give an upper limit.

If ever there’s a more urgent need to change the PN Correspondent then a proposal can address it; a once-a-month checkin feels about right for how important it’s likely to be in the short term.

I’ve amended the names bullet point as suggested; for posterity, my original is below:

When the name of a Tripper or any other ruleset-defined entity contains wikimedia mark-up tokens (as set out here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext_examples) and that name would be added to the ruleset, any such markup characters in that name are either rendered as plain text (and thus not permitted to cause the wikimedia software to apply formatting) or, if that is not possible, are omitted.

Checking the historical player list, we’d also have to include underscores, hyphens, full stops, commas, apostrophes, tildes and ampersands, for players such as:

* gazebo_dude
* Seventy-Fifth Trombone
* Sgt. Zed
* Ujalu, the unnecessary.
* Schrodinger’s Cat
* nomic^3
* Luther&Locke

We also have a “Ragnar Danneskjöld” (which reads with mangled characters in the admin interface, and also when I paste it here). I think that’s down to our ExpressionEngine install supporting diacritics in a different way to how it used to. Does saying “the Latin alphabet” imply that diacritics are acceptable?

(Also, “between 5 and 20 characters in length” will invalidate your own name.)

Tildes are ~, aren’t they?

Maybe it’s only = that’s a serious risk, but we might want to include a grandfather clause for old names anyway, and err towards the restrictive.

Oh, yes, I mean carets.

Traditionally, quotation marks and greater-than and less-than symbols can cause problems when displayed on web pages or put into databases, and ExpressionEngine was getting a bit stroppy about the ampersand just now (insisting on adding a semicolon to the end of the line in case I’d meant to write a special HTML character called “Locke”).

Allowing a few of the listed characters (underscores, hyphens and apostrophes?) and grandfathering older names sound about right. There are also a few names beyond your upper bound, including “Seventy-Fifth Trombone” at 22 characters, and the longest “Publius Scribonius Scholasticus” at 31.

(I am very unlikely to vote for making the PodNomic declaration an unintuitive Special Case rule, though, sorry.)

That’s okay, best to get the wording right at least.

I do get what you’re saying with the special case objection, btw - it’s not what the special case rules are for, I agree - it’s just that the special case rules have the qualities that I think the rule needs (been present while being mostly inert flavour text, having toggle-able interactivity, having the role be applicable through means other than just proposals while not being completely as hoc), and rebuilding those qualities in another rule adds a lot of words.

Happy with the name fix, but I’m still unconvinced by the Special Case thing, which while a clever reuse of unintended mechanics just sets up a series of puzzling questions to the casual (or even veteran) reader, the big one being “It’s inactive, so we don’t have a PodNomic correspondent right now?” which can only be answered if the reader is also familiar with the PodNomic ruleset.

An appendix bullet of “The player named TyGuy6 is the PodNomic Correspondent” would do the job. (If TyGuy even wants to do it and wasn’t just naming themselves as a placeholder example here.)

I still have not heard a convincing argument for why this should be defined and tracked by us rather than by podnomic

If it’s a role that’s framed as representing the voice of BlogNomic in some way, I think it’s better to have us be in control of who that person is, and to know when that changes, without having to actually keep up with PodNomic. PodNomic having its own rule of “[least suitable player] is the BlogNomic correspondent” would be frustrating, if we had to join PodNomic and make a proposal to change that.

I think the Nomic ecosystem could use more clear points of contact generally. I don’t remember how far the old InterNomic Ambassador framework went, but it would do some good to have something like that again, particularly in this age of walled Discord Nomics which may or may not even still be running.

@Kevan but the only people who should really care about who the blognomic rep is is someone playing both nomics. Why should others care what is happening on podnomic?

If the person over there is acting as a representative of BlogNomic, I care about the impression they’re giving. If we knew that a local radio station wanted one of us on to talk about Nomic, I’d expect the group to discuss and agree on who was going to do it, rather than letting the station just contact and interview a random player because we don’t listen to that station and it doesn’t matter.

If the people demand it, I will accept my questionable placement as the <flavor text>Blognomic Correspondent</flavor text>, in order to allow this reasonable naming convention to be added to the Appendix. ;)