Having told this story and mused on it a bit, I'm wondering if my memory is faulty. I know we *talked* a lot about mass deregistration, but I'm also remembering we talked about some less drastic solutions, something like everybody announcing "I hereby resign all my offices" and a few other mass statements like that so we knew for a fact every office was vacant. Can't remember what magic formula we all intoned in the end (the Proposal fixed everything retroactively, so if we all deregistered it's not in the Registrar's history).
Murphy would probably remember, my memory is e led some of the clean- up efforts: I was pretty much a bystander whose contribution was just to post whatever message we all came up with. (All I remember about "when" is it was between late 2001 and 2004, I spot checked some 2003 archives and couldn't find it, it may have been in 2002 before the current archives start). On Thu, 7 Sep 2017, Kerim Aydin wrote: > On Thu, 7 Sep 2017, Owen Jacobson wrote: > > It’s also to deal with situations where the platonic gamestate and the > > apprehended gamestate have diverged too radically to be resolved. > > G., were you around when Agora had exactly 1 player, for long enough > > to pass some proposals to fix game state? > > For various reasons it turned out that many office changes that we > thought had gone through had failed (I think for about 6 months), so > we had no idea who held many offices (including Promotor and Assessor), > and many things that only an Officer CAN do were invalid, basically > 6 months of play broken. > > Since only those two could get a proposal through, we couldn't fix it > via proposal. We also didn't have deputization at the time, so we > couldn't just have someone grab an office. Nor did we have "Agora is > a Nomic" protection for the proposal system, IIRC. > > But the rules *were* specifically written so that, through a kinda > complicated succession system, if there was ever only one player, that > player would officially hold all offices, so the "protection" was > that one player could always bootstrap the game if e was the only > player. > > So we all quit the game except one person, so we then knew 100% who was > allowed to do the jobs, and e got a Proposal through fixing everything. > > The reason this couldn't happen today is because the ratification is > tied to "any document" that no one objects to, so we don't have to > know who an officer is to get a ratification through. And self- > ratification means you only have to go back so far in time. > > BUT: the current situation, when Proposals aren't broken, is something > that would be fixed firmly by proposal in the past, not ratification. > A Proposal both fixing the rule and saying "the gamestate is hereby > set to what it would be if the rule had always read the new way" > would do the trick. Not that ratification is "evil" for allowing you > to set things to "a lie", but some people have historically been as > queasy as CuddleBeam about doing so, personal preference. > > -G. > >
