> Appellant Zefram's Arguments: > > We have commonly accepted a published correction to a prior report as > constituting a new report that incorporates the bulk of the prior report > by reference. In the present case, Murphy's second message applies a > correction in the form of an additional set of votes to insert into the > prior message; it is clear how adding these votes affects the totals, > so I see no need for the revised totals to be included explicitly.
A correct tally is, however, required by R208. > We have considerable history of accepting parts of these messages to > be implicit. Indeed, the assessor's present practice, extending back > past the time that this CFJ is concerned with, is to not explicitly > indicate "ADOPTED", "FAILED QUORUM", and so on, for each proposal, but > to leave that implicit. It can be easily determined by examining the > "AI", "VI", "Quorum", and "Voters" rows, but a strict reading of rule > 208 would require it to be stated on a row of its own. Such a strict > reading is contrary to game custom. The lack of an explicit "ADOPTED" > has not been questioned, neither in the resolution notice that this case > is concerned with nor in the surrounding months. This argument actually sways me toward AFFIRM. I find the present practice of omitting the final outcome to be quite exasperating, especially as Gmail makes it a bit painful to view a message in a fixed-width font. Using the regular view, the columns do not line up, which makes the manual calculation difficult. If I haven't questioned the practice before now, it is only because it hadn't occurred to me that it might be questionable. > Judge Eris objects that the correcting notice did not give any firm > identification of the original notice which it augmented. That is > incorrect. The correcting message includes a "References:" header, > in which the first item is the message ID of the original notice. > This is a normal place to expect such a reference to be found; it is > not obfuscated in any way. The original message could also be following > the "In-Reply-To:" chain, which also works by message ID; the chain is > of length two in this case, the middle link being Wooble's DF message > which points out the error and quotes the body of the original notice > in its entirety. If we can't expect a player to look as far as the Subject header for context, I think it's totally out of the question to expect em to look in the References or In-Reply-To headers, which are automatically hidden by most email clients. > Judge Eris's point about message IDs was in support of eir claim that the > correcting notice failed to clearly identify the matters to be resolved. > Even ignoring the reference to the preceding message, the notice stated > that it was concerned with proposals, and identified the proposals > by number. This is precisely the same manner in which the original > (incorrect) notice, and all resolution notices regarding proposals, > identify the matters to be resolved. The judge appears to be mistaken > on a matter of law regarding what it is that must be clearly identified. Judge Eris was not specific about what it was that was not "clearly identified". R208 refers to two things that must be "clearly identified": the matter to be resolved and the options available. Since, as you point out, the former is clearly identified in both messages, I think it likely that Judge Eris was referring to the latter. One potential argument pertaining to message continuity that was not brought up is the precedent of CFJs 1451 and 1452. However, those both pertain to a single message broken up over multiple emails, whereas this case pertains to a single message in a single email with a subsequent correction, so it is not clear to me whether the precedent should apply. It would be nice to see the argument considered, though. > Finally, the judge argues that for the interests of the game we should > not permit a resolution notice that does not explicitly list vote totals. > To be explicit there is something that assessors should no doubt consider > good advice, but I suggest that invalidating the notice for the lack is > contrary to the interests of the game. I find this argument to be persuasive. However, it only rebuts half of Judge Eris's argument, so I do not think it is by itself sufficient to merit reversal judgement. Overall, I'm leaning toward a judgement of REMAND, as I would like for Judge Eris to consider the precedent of CFJs 1451 and 1452 in eir arguments. -root
