All Uphold is intended to do is give a convenient keyword for retroactively cleaning up gamestate where an illegal action was mistakenly accepted and built upon. Before we had the keyword, we’d just write these things ad hoc, sometimes wording them badly, sometimes laboriously avoiding retroactivity by updating stats directly - keywording it makes it easier for both the proposer and voter to know that a fix is doing exactly what it’s meant to do.

If the existence of a Keyword is encouraging some players to announce illegal actions on the grounds that they’re easy to retroactively legalise afterwards, we could discourage that from the other side by clarifying the merely-implicit “players may not knowingly take illegal actions” as a rule somewhere.

(Off-hand I can really only think of Clucky suggesting that although it was impossible to process a recent Round, they might do so anyway and uphold it afterwards with the same outcome.)

I think retroactivity is fine. I agree with Kevan that having a carefully-worded standard term is a good thing.

Looking back at Upholdings over the last month we also started the dynasty with a No Collaboration bug making it illegal for non-Emperor players to talk in public, which the Emperor acknowledged but encouraged us to ignore since an Uphold fix was pending. (I didn’t think that was the right call, but I couldn’t comment because it was illegal for me to talk in public.)

If “players may not deliberately perform illegal actions” isn’t implicit in Rule 1.1, and in the wider fact that we’re playing a game with rules at all, maybe that should actually be written down.

Being able to uphold illegal actions prevents the game from ever getting truly stuck.

[Clucky] This proposal changes nothing about our options: we’d still be able to post a CfJ or proposal which used the “retroactively declare the attempt to take it to have been successful” wording that the current Upholding definition uses. It’s just a keyword.

But its a useful keyword to have. And the explicit “uphold everything after a DoV is enacted” is rather useful to prevent any sort of “technically that DoV from 2017 was illegal so the entire gamestate since then is invalid” shenanigans.