On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote: > On Wed, 17 Jul 2013, omd wrote: >> Hopefully this creates a single obvious meaning for "the time >> date-stamped on that message" in R478, so we can finally stop arguing >> about the timing of messages. ;p > > In this case, it's interesting to note that the only people who have > raised an issue or confusion over time stamps are the people with the > most to gain in the game from that interpretation.
I do not understand. As has been noted, the timing of the last-minute General Election messages does not make much difference in-game, because the Best Party wins regardless of the validity of your votes, and scshunt's message was effective even if sent after the end of the voting period; and of course date munging only applies to future messages in any case. The only thing I gain is the ability to send last-minute messages without having to initiate a court case to determine their success, which applies equally to everyone (unless I sent a message directly from the server in the last fraction of a second, but I would consider that unethical). > This is exactly the kind of thing that caused problems for the moderator > of nomic world (Geoff), as e simultaneously made game reality decisions > on eir own instant judgement, thus exposing emself to charges of > favoritism. I apologize if this is perceived, although again, I do not see how I am favoring anyone. I was not expecting controversy because I temporarily enabled this when I became Distributor a month and a half ago, with more tentative wording in the announcement: On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:50 AM, omd <c.ome...@gmail.com> wrote: > There is an experimental feature which I went ahead and implemented, > but I'd appreciate feedback and will turn it off if desired: all list > messages are piped through a script which rewrites the Date header to > be the same as the relevant value from the appropriate Received > header, for the convenience of recordkeepors. There has been some > confusion over the years over which header is canonical - > http://cfj.qoid.us/707, http://cfj.qoid.us/1646, and other later CFJs > suggest always using Received, but Murphy argues in both > http://cfj.qoid.us/2773 and http://cfj.qoid.us/2800 that the Date > header is to be used when it's within a normal range of the Received > header - but I assume the latter interpretation exists to keep > recordkeepors from having to look up headers all the time, not as some > kind of date choosing service for players, so no harm or rights > violation should be incurred in making the issue moot by rewriting the > Date header, allowing the normal datestamp shown in email clients to > be used for all recordkeeping purposes (unless two messages have > identical timestamps, as in http://cfj.qoid.us/3076, which remains an > issue for now). Although I soon turned it off because I was too busy to fix the Gmail issue, there were no objections to the feature at the time. Thus I did not use that wording this time, but of course I am still willing to turn it off if desired and will perhaps be more careful in the future. As for legislating before adjusting, I was going to submit a proposal, but it seemed pretty clear to me that what R478 says is sufficient, if the forum has a canonical date stamp: Any action performed by sending a message is performed at the time date-stamped on that message. But sure, conducting an informal poll in advance might indeed have been a wise move.
