On Sat, 21 Oct 2017 at 20:11 Kerim Aydin <ke...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> > > On Sat, 21 Oct 2017, Ørjan Johansen wrote: > > In a below quoted message of 19 October, ATMunn succeeded in changing > > eir votes. > > This is CFJ 3581. I assign it to Alexis. > > > > Argument: The plain text version of the message has atrocious formatting, > > looking like all votes are from the quoted part from 16 October, not new > > content. > The original message is stored in the archives here: https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/2017-October/036487.html Note that this page shows the text/plain part by default; the text/html portion can be viewed by clicking the link at the bottom, although this presents a sanitized version of the page, causing serious encoding issues. This case relates to CFJ 3572, where o draws attention to the fact that a multipart/alternative message such as ATMunn's must include multiple versions of the same information. Based on the logic of that case, it must be the case that a player cannot perform an action clearly or unambiguously if it differs between parts of a multipart/alternative message. Thus, in order for ATMunn's vote change to be valid, it must be clear exactly what votes e was changing and how in both the plain text and HTML versions of the message. So what do each say? The HTML version of the message has each of the votes at two levels of quoting deep. That is to say, the votes are written so that they appear in the quoted message beginning with "Oops". By contrast, the text/plain version precedes each vote by a mess of indentation: >>>> 7922* Alexis 3.0 Clarity Act Alexis 1 = AP >>> >>> =E2=80=8BFOR=E2=80=8B >> >>> 7923* Gaelan 1.0 Another Economy Fix Attempt Gaelan 1 A= P >>> >>> AGAINST. I transfer Alexis another shiny (bringing my total up to 2) in >> an obvious bribe, again. >> Note the use of the greater-than signs, to indicate levels of quotation. Each line containing a vote is preceded by three levels quotation, although subsequent lines (including a continuation of the previous line, in the second example) are indented by only two. >From a strictly semantic point of view, these messages are not identical. The quoting expressed in the plain text portion is different from the HTML portion. As a result, this is enough to consider them suspect. However, evaluating the two messages in context of the outer messages, namely "I change my vote as follows:" and the TTttPF around that, it is clear that ATMunn's intent is to change eir votes. The only reasonable interpretation of the plain-text message is that e is changing eir votes to the ones listed; the weird formatting does not change that there is a clear list of proposals to be voted on and votes to be cast. This list of votes accords between the plain-text and HTML versions. Consequently, ATMunn's message is saved by the fact that the interpretation of eir actions---the actual semantic content from the point of view of the game---is clear and identical in both versions of the message. If there were, say, additional votes being quoted elsewhere in the message, it's quite possible that the formatting issues would cause the plain text to become unclear and, subsequently, the entire attempt to fail. Accordingly, I judge TRUE. Issues regarding MIME email have been more and more common as of late, and not in a good way. If the above judgment is left to stand, it's quite possible that a player could scam by deliberately sending different plain text and HTML portions with actions just different to cause them all to fail, while convincing all players who do not read both parts (which includes those who use only text) that they have performed an action. It was recently brought to my attention that Mailman, the software running the Agoran mailing lists, is capable of removing all parts of messages that are not plain text. As a result, I propose the following and pend it for 1 shiny: Proposal: HTML Scrubbing (AI=1) {{{ The Distributor is hereby requested to enable the Mailman feature(s) to strip non-plain-text parts of emails sent by the agoranomic.org mailing lists. }}} And, since I'm here, I'll also propose the following and pend it for 1 shiny: Proposal: No List Prefixes (AI=1) {{{ The Distributor is hereby requested to disable the DIS, BUS, and OFF prefixes automatically added to mail sent by the agoranomic.org mailing lists. }}} Personally, I don't find them useful; they obscure subject lines, are not useful for searching or filtering (because they cannot be added more than once when a thread bounces back between -business and -discussion), and just make things look ugly with e.g. Fwd: DIS: Re: BUS: Re: OFF: Whatever. They also make outgoing mail have a different prefix from the returned mail from the mailing list, which confuses my client, at least. Because they don't actually impart useful information consistently, I personally think there's little value to including them so I'll put that up for vote too. Then I claim a reward of 1 shiny back for judging the CFJ. -Alexis
