On Wed, 2019-07-17 at 22:19 -0400, Jason Cobb wrote: > The key (broken) wording here is from Rule 478: > > A person "publishes" or "announces" something by sending a > public message. > > This wording does not require that the public message actually > contains the "something" that I am publishing/announcing. This > wording effectively says that, for all X, a person "publishes" or > "announces" X by sending a public message.
Gratuitous: If this reading were correct, any public message would automatically take all by-announcement actions, including deregistering. I first thought that this is probably enough to trigger Rule 1698, so if this reading is correct, Rule 478 actually says something different (and it might take us a while to figure out what). OTOH, I don't see how such a situation would amend rule 2034, which appears to provide a method of escaping from this particular deadlock (meaning that AIAN remains untriggered). We'd need to publish a message purporting to resolve a proposal that amends the rules and gamestate to a non-broken state, and then cease to send any public messages for a week (to be on the safe side; CoEs don't use "publish" or "announce" wording but other effects that might break the self-ratification might, and besides the rules may say something different from what we expect if we have this level of brokenness). The purported fix proposal would self-ratify as having happened, regardless of the actual gamestate. That said, I think this reading of rule 478 is not a natural one, and the wording elsewhere in the rule implies that it's incorrect, e.g. "Actions in messages (including sub-messages) are performed in the order they appear in the message, unless otherwise specified." It's one that's sufficiently disastrous if true that we may want to take corrective measures, though. (For example, if this interpretation /is/ true, Agora currently has exactly one player, and it may be very hard to determine who it is. Note that Apathy victories are only possible for players, so if the reasoning is correct, the victory very likely fails.) -- ais523
