On Thu, 7 Sep 2017, Alex Smith wrote: > On Thu, 2017-09-07 at 03:15 +0200, Cuddle Beam wrote: > > Hrm. This is interesting. (If they're different) Would the verdict be what > > I intended the message to mean or the consensus on the interpretation of > > what I've written? > > It'd be pretty bad for the game if a person's actual intentions (which > can be guessed at but never known for certain or proven) had an effect > on the platonic gamestate. Self-ratification might be able to stem the > issues slightly but it's better to avoid them altogether. > > Conditionals are evaluated based on what they actually say. If that's > ambiguous or there's no single clear meaning, the action typically > fails altogether (assuming it's an action by announcement, and most > actions are; see the last paragraph of rule 478).
Votes aren't. You "submit a ballot ... by publishing a notice". Otherwise you really *would* have to say "I vote as follows" for every vote. As to CuddleBeam's question, I think I remember a special case of an "ambiguous" precedent somewhere, something like: "if an action might have been performed through more than one mechanism due to ambiguity (e.g. statement could be either conditional or nonconditional vote), and the mechanism chosen makes a game difference (e.g. the time of evaluation), then it fails altogether through ambiguity."
