On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Alexander Smith wrote: > Goethe wrote: >> The Annabel Crisis appeared in a 419 scam? Do tell! (And I'll tell >> you :) ). > Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be deliberate. > <http://osdir.com/ml/sysutils.pcp/2005-12/msg00009.html> is archived > by one of the same websites that archives Agora mailing lists, and > contains both the words "Annabel" and "crisis".
Ok, full story: "Annabel" was a player who registered for a few months in 1999 and 2001, participated in a minor way (did very little) and later deregistered. No big deal. Or at least so it appeared. A couple years after the fact, out of the blue, longtime player Maud confessed to something that had been bugging em for a long time: e was really Annabel, and had posted those messages under that alias. Unfortunately, then, as now, we didn't hold by "avatar" theory. You didn't create multiple personalities (avatars) by registering. You were one person, and regardless of whose nickname you posted under, all those actions applied to you. So, all actions that Annabel posted were really performed by Maud because they were posted by Maud. Including (the big one) when Annabel posted "I deregister". So Maud had really not been a player for a couple years when everyone thought e was a player. This Included time periods of being assessor and posting the results of proposals. Which e was never authorized to do. And we had no self- ratification, so it was suddenly unclear what proposals hadn't passed because e wasn't assessor, and what proposals after that were broken because they relied on the earlier proposals, etc. etc. Also, many officer elections would have been invalid, so we had no idea who the "real" officers were to actually pass proposals. Solutions proposed: 1. judicially declare all actions performed by "annabel" to be (retroactively) ineffective because, in retrospect, the messages didn't constitute clear communication as to whom they applied to (I still think this would have and did work, hence no crisis, but this was a minority view). 2. have everyone deregister except 1 person whom we were sure was still a player and had been a player throughout the whole time. That person would become the holder of every office and proposals would have a quorum of 1. We would then be sure whom the holder of every office was. E could then ratify by proposal the recent rulesets and officer reports and everyone could re-register going on as before. (I think this fix wouldn't work/is broken now, when offices can be vacant and the speaker is no longer the default officeholder?) Anyway, we never did this, maybe because we never convinced everyone to deregister en masse. 3. pass a proposal ratifying the gamestate without #2 first. I think we did this, but I think several people always thought this didn't solve the problem (and we still haven't solved the problem) because we didn't do #2 first. That's the Annabel crisis! Which we still might be in. Or maybe self- ratification has invisibly lifted us out of it... if the self-ratification rule ever passed. -Goethe
