On Mon, 2026-02-02 at 14:17 -0500, Janet Cobb via agora-official wrote: > Well, since I was kindly reminded by Trigon that it's Read the Ruleset > Week (thank you), here's a very hastily put together unofficial contest: > > * For the next 30 days, I pledge to not attempt to exploit any private > submission, or any scam or loophole derived from any private > submission, until the end of the Agoran day following the day in > which the solution is made public.
This pledge is unfortunately broken in multiple ways. The most notable is that it doesn't prevent you using information derived from a contest entry to *counterscam* a scam once you've been informed of it. There are at least two others, but mentioning them publicly might give clues as to scams I'm planning to try. As such, I'm somewhat discouraged from submitting the *best* scam I found to the contest, as if I did so it wouldn't work correctly and it's good enough that I may well try it. So instead, here's the third-best and second-best scams/unusual rule interactions I found while reading through the ruleset, which are my (it took me more than a week...), which are my two contest entries: 3. As far as I can tell, the definition of "person" in rule 869 includes corporations (which can originate ideas that are created by discussion/committee of the people who make them up), and more notably, probably includes Agora itself (which can also originate ideas that way). I would, however, recommend against trying to register Agora to itself (the problem that it can't send emails is fixable, but I am worried how it would interact with the basis overlap rule). 2. I think that it's possible for the Prime Minister to support eir own tabled Emergency Regulation actions. The reason is that rule 2124 attempts to secure the ability to limit the ability to support them at power 3.1 (the power of rule 2614); by doing so, it secures itself away from being able to prevent the tabler of an action from supporting it (due to Cretans). It also secures itself away from preventing people supporting/objecting multiple times, but that's unexploitable because doing so doesn't actually change the "vote" count (R2124 counts the number of persons who supported while a player, not the number of supports). One complication is that rule 1688 sets a default for Power Threshold (which in this case would be 3) but allows the securing rule to "lower" it: this was intended to prevent rules securing things at a Power Threshold above their own Power. In this case, the securing rule is Power 3, which makes it powerful enough to set a non-default value outright, without needing to use the allowance in rule 1688 to lower it. -- ais523
