Judgement in CFJ 4103 and CFJ 4104:
Arguments:
{
The caller, and several others in gratuitous arguments, note that the
mailman.agoranomic.org web archives and mail-archive.org display the
message in which CFJ 4103 was initiated as having 5 ">" characters.
Although this is the case, I find that this cannot alter the
interpretation of the message. The current precedent for what a "forum"
is CFJ 3884, in which H. Judge Aris held that "A forum is, in the Agoran
context, an open medium for communication.". As shown in the latest
Registrar's weekly report [0], the public forum known as
"agora-business" is identified as "agora-business at agoranomic.org".
This is an email address, and the forum is used for communication via
email. Any web interfaces are merely archives of the forum; they cannot
be used for communication back to the forum, and thus are not part of
the "medium for communication". What matters for the purposes of
interpreting messages is solely what is sent out by the mailing list
software, not how the server may later display it on a website.
CFJ 3534 held that email messages are not to be interpreted solely using
the bytes that are sent to a recipient. Instead, they are to be
interpreted using the various email RFCs, just as a normal email client
would do. It appears that the mailing list software sent out the message
to the people subscribed to the forum without adding additional ">"s at
the beginning of lines, and this is how email clients have interpreted
it. As far as I can tell, neither SMTP nor MIME specify escaping for
such quotes, so this is the standards-conforming interpretation of the
message.
For instance, my email client (Thunderbird) shows the message in which
CFJ 4103 was called as having four ">" characters (although one of them
is rendered into a blockquote, this is understood to mean ">"). ais523
claims to have received the message with four ">" characters. Although
4st claims to have received the message with 6 ">" characters, eir quote
of the message only includes 4 ">" characters (excluding those used to
quote the reply itself). No other person has stated their client
displayed a different number of ">" characters.
Thus, according to both the standards and actual practice, the message
distributed by the forum contained four ">" characters. This is
consistent with the intent of the sender, so there are no issues about a
mismatch between intent and reality. So, although the caller raises
questions about message corruption in eir arguments, none of them need
to be resolved in order to decide this case, and I do not attempt to do
so here.
There is, however, the question of whether the attempt to transfer
Spendies meets the requirement for a "by announcement" action. The
caller must specify the action "clearly and unambiguously". Although
this is questionable, we have held that mere uncertainty about the legal
interpretation of a value does not prevent this standard from being met
(e.g. "I transfer all of my spendies to X", when the number of spendies
in question is subject to a CFJ). Since there is a single, unambiguous
number of ">"s in the message, I hold that this action does meet the "by
announcement" standard and that the caller transferred 4 spendies.
Finally, it is undisputed that the caller possessed 20 spendies
immediately before attempting the transfer, and, given the above, there
is no reason to believe that CFJ 4103 does not actually exist.
CFJ 4103 judged TRUE. CFJ 4104 judged TRUE.
}
Evidence:
{
[0]
https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-official/2025-January/018264.html
{
Publicity Location or description Typical use
--------- ----------------------- -----------
Public agora-official at agoranomic.org official reports
Public agora-business at agoranomic.org other business
Public agoranomic at groups.io * backup
Discussion agora-discussion at agoranomic.org discussion
Discussion https://discord.gg/JCC6YGc discussion
Discussion agora-talk at agora.nomic.space discussion
Foreign agora at listserver.tue.nl backup
Foreign irc://irc.libera.chat:6667/##nomic discussion
Foreign matrix:r/#agoranomiccommunity:mozilla.org discussion
Foreign irc://irc.libera.chat:6667/##nomic-drafting discussion
}
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rule 478/42 (Power=3)
Fora
Publicity is a secured forum switch with values Public,
Discussion, and Foreign (default), tracked by the Registrar.
The Registrar CAN change the publicity of a forum without
objection as long as:
1. e sends eir announcement of intent to that forum; and
2. if the forum is to be made public, the announcement by which
the Registrar makes that forum public is sent to all existing
public fora.
Each player should ensure e can receive messages via each public
forum.
A public message is a message sent via a public forum, or sent to
all players and containing a clear designation of intent to be
public. A rule can also designate that a part of one public
message is considered a public message in its own right. To
"publish" or "announce" something is to send a public message
whose body contains that thing. To do something "publicly" is
to do that thing within a public message.
Where the rules define an action that a person CAN perform "by
announcement", that person performs that action by, in a single
public message, specifying the action and setting forth intent to
perform that action by sending that message, doing both clearly
and unambiguously.
Any action performed by sending a message is performed at the time
date-stamped on that message. Actions in messages (including
sub-messages) are performed in the order they appear in the
message, unless otherwise specified. Allowing actions performed by
sending a message to take place simultaneously must be done
explicitly and is secured at power 2.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
}
--
Janet Cobb
Assessor, Rulekeepor
