BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Yep. Didn’t notice it before, but there’s got to be a scam there.

:NOVOTE: I didn’t intend a scam in the rule in question when I wrote it. (Of course, that doesn’t mean that none exists.) This also has never lead to a scam over at Agora, somehow, which is strange given that basically the same rule exists there (with fewer safeguards!) and rule titles have been held via CFJ to potentially have an effect on the game, together with Agora being a place where core rules scams are encouraged.

Didn’t realise this was your rule. It feels like there must be some tricksy way to have a proposal title that camouflages itself against “does not change the meaning of any part of the ruleset” - some silly “the ruleset is considered to have been in the same state as it is now, prior to the proposal which created this sentence” clause, or something. Give me a place to stand and the ability to inject arbitrary ruleset text.

Yep, I agree that there’s probably a scam on that somewhere, if rule titles have meaning in BlogNomic. The clause was more to stop someone putting (Blue) or (Owned by Bucky) or [Invention] or some similar ruleset-defined clause in the title (in Agora, rule titles tend not to be significant in that manner). It wasn’t to stop people putting “Ten seconds from the enactment of this rule the body of this rule changes to state ‘Kevan may achieve victory’” in the title, because that sort of thing, I suspect doesn’t work anyway, and it would be foolish to try to block it.

I’m just dipping my toe into the scamming world, but couldn’t you simply design a proposal which has no malevolent effects, but then change a title to a dynastic keyword, changing the sense of the new proposal, thus making it incredibly powerful for someone willing to painstakingly construct a proposal without it being too obvious.

Just add a clause to the Glossary saying that rule titles never affect the meaning of the ruleset.

[comex] Seems easier to have a dull but bulletproof fourteen-word solution, than a different one that requires three different safety mechanisms to deal with the arbitrary text injection.

(And I think there’d still be arguable room for arbitrary text to outwit a “rule titles never affect the meaning of the ruleset” clause - such as a rule title of “hey, rule titles definitely affect the meaning of the ruleset, this sentence takes precedence over the appendix”.)

@Kevan: It’s probably possible to resolve that sort of issue: see Agora’s rule 1030, http://agora.qoid.us/rule/1030#598850 (especially, look at its historical evolution over time). It took almost 16 years to iron out all the bugs in it, though, and there still may be more that people don’t know about. This fix is at least simpler, I guess.

@comex: I’d rather leave that open, seems to me, allowing titles to have an effect in some cases is a positive thing.

I guess it’s a question of whether you consider the name of something to intrinsically have an effect (in which case you need complicated rules that attempt to ensure that one bit of ruleset gets respected over another bit of ruleset; see also http://students.imsa.edu/~dwarf/agora/theses/andre-an.html), or probably not (in which case a rule saying it doesn’t it just confirmation).