I think

This is always a tough one, as it has to cover things like choosing when (and whether) to enact or fail proposals. Can I make a proposal straight away after failing my queued one, or is that an advantage that other players are denied? Can I process a proposal within two minutes of changing my vote so that it makes a difference, or is that giving me an advantage? And so on. At some point it becomes preferable to stop being an admin.

I did consider specifying that it had to be a material of quantifiable advantage - would that be better, do you think?

I think it is not unfair that most non-Admins would prefer that admin functions remained administrative, rather than tactical. Under the current circumstances it seems wiser to pass something and refine it than to beg the question and hope that notice slips away.

I understand the sentiment, but this clause is way too vague. Besides proposal enactment, idling/unidling players (including oneself) can often confer an immediate (though often minor) advantage to the performing admin.

A more radical alternative is change the role of admins from action-takers to record keepers. Actions that currently require admin intervention would happen as soon as they are announced and admins would be responsible for updating the blog/gndt/player list afterwards. I don’t see any immediate harm in allowing players to enact proposals by comment or add GNDT actions to their unidling post.

Admins as record-keepers is an interesting direction. If we replace the GNDT with an embedded wiki page then all admins would be doing is editing proposals to close them, and tinkering the sidebar player list. Having the open/closed state of proposals visibly lagging by a few hours isn’t ideal, but doesn’t really seem that bad.

Outside of that, I think it’s just a matter of being careful to write fair rules. Which I think we did here, really - the fact that admins could steal the Codename-name that someone else requested only mattered for this one scam that relied on creating a Codename with a funny name. Stealing a normal Codename wouldn’t have made any difference to anything.

I’ve never really had problems in the past finding an admin willing to do admin actions for me, even as part of a scam. (Of course, there were more players there.) Even if they were potentially controversial (like inserting a newly enacted rule in an unexpected place in the ruleset to intentionally throw off the numbering; we have a rule against that nowadays).

Actually, I don’t this would have even changed the endgame of this dynasty: any player (including an admin) could have followed ShareDVI’s Proto request with another Proto request for the same Codename. Admins are not required to process such requests in any particular order.

Although I suppose choosing to process your own first would give you a game advantage. Which is where it starts to tip towards being a bad thing to be an admin: if there’s only one active admin and every player has submitted a game-winning Proto request, the admin is worse off than everyone else.

Wait, how does Darknight’s defer vote works now? Does it still follow Josh or Kevan?

The duplication is an ongoing effect rather than one that takes effect at the time of the DEF vote (“When the Zero Cool has a valid Vote other than VETO on a Proposal, then all votes of DEFERENTIAL are instead considered to be valid and the same as the Zero Cool’s Vote”), so it switches to me.