On Mon, 2024-12-16 at 17:50 -0500, Janet Cobb via agora-business wrote: > ["inquiry case" is a historical term used throughout the rules; defining > it here removes any ambiguity and helps answer a question that has been > asked multiple times by newer places. Also, standardize casing to match > most other uses of "syn.".]
Just to give some history on this: CFJs have been called CFJs for ages (well before I first started playing), but at some points in Agora's history there were multiple different sorts of CFJ. An "inquiry case" was the sort of CFJ we have nowadays; you make a statement and the judge opines on whether it is true or false. There have been at least four other sorts of CFJ over Agora's history, though: * a "criminal case" in which the judge determined whether a crime had been committed, and the punishment would be applied as a consequence of the CFJ judgement; * an "appeal case" in which the appeals panel determined what to do with a CFJ whose verdict had been disputed (it could be reopened with the same or different judge, have the verdict overriden, or left alone); the judge for such cases was a panel of three people (rather than a single person), which was an interesting corner of the rules to play around with for CFJs; * a type of case which ruled on whether or not a win had occurred (this was short-lived and I can't remember what it was called, although "victory case" seems plausible), perhaps we should bring those back as winning can occasionally feel underwhelming at present and it would add more ceremony to the occasion; * and an "equity case", which was by far the most interesting (although it was eventually considered a failed experiment the experimentation itself was fun), in which the judge tried to figure out a fair way to handle the consequences of someone violating a contract or pledge (and had the interesting implementation in which the judgements were contracts/pledges of their own, allowing for almost arbitrary consequences, as long as the verdict survived an appeal). Sometimes, this was able to figure out a fair resolution, but often either a) the solution was so obvious that it would have been implemented regardless (e.g. "I accidentally spent a contract- defined asset I didn't have, and that self-ratified, but I have some now" would be resolved as "destroy enough of that asset to cover the debt"), or b) the judge couldn't figure out what to do to resolve the mess and the case didn't really help. So in a sense, defining that synonym is historically inaccurate as it'd cause all the past non-inquiry CFJs to be considered inquiry cases. (A more historically accurate approach would be "An inquiry case is a type of CFJ" whilst defining no other types of CFJ, and also specifying that the current mechanism for creating a CFJ creates an inquiry case – that leaves open the possibility that other types of CFJ exist (which they do) whilst providing no mechanism to create new ones.) Alternatively, we could bring some of the other types of CFJ back, or create new ones! Admittedly, most of them didn't work well for their intended purpose (appeals cases were slow to judge due to the need to collect a panel, leading to CFJs running on for months sometimes; criminal CFJs were clunky enough that they discouraged people from calling them, causing a lot of crimes to go unpunished; equity cases generally didn't work for their intended purpose in any but the simplest situations), but the complexity was fun to mess around with and lead to some interesting scams. I do think victory cases might be a good idea, though; even in cases where the victory is noncontroversial it is nice to have confirmation that other players think that it's noncontroversial. -- ais523
