ais523 wrote:
On Sat, 2024-12-28 at 21:01 -0800, Edward Murphy via agora-discussion wrote:
ais523 wrote:
So the message itself is sufficient indication of the person's
intentions, as far as I can tell. I don't think it's reasonable to
assume that someone might have intentionally tried to award emself a
welcome package while remaining not a player; such a person a) would be
running the risk of becoming registered by accident, and assuming that
risk shows some intention of possibly becoming a player; b) would have
had to misread the part of the welcome package rules that states that
they only applied to players; and c) would be attempting a scam with no
possible gain (and the potential loss of a welcome package due to the
30-day lockout).
Given the number of new players who have tripped over some sort of
seemingly routine procedural mistake early in their gameplay, I
continue to disagree.
A player who intends to register and makes a procedural mistake doing
so still intends to register. I don't see how procedural mistakes are
at all relevant here: the language of the rule is clear that all that
matters (assuming not banned, etc.) is indicating the desire to become
a player, and a message that contains procedural *mistakes* does do
that! The only situation in which you would get such a message from a
player who didn't desire to register would be if it contained
*intentional* procedural errors that were intended to stop the
registration; a player who makes an accidental error (a mistake) is
still attempting to become a player, and thus still has a desire to
register.
Hmm, I still think there are some potential gaps here, though I'm less
convinced that thimble actually ran into any of them.
It's unambiguous that thimble intended to become a player at /some/
point, as e published an unambiguous message within a couple minutes
after the initial Welcome Package message.
In the general case, as you note below, it's possible that someone
didn't intend to become a player at a certain time because e thought e
already was one (due to sending a previous message, or even just
subscribing to the lists or joining the Discord server). Here, you're
focusing on how likely it is for someone to misread the relevant rules--
which I think is somewhat more likely than you do, but I'm also
considering the possibility that they /have not read those rules at
all/, and are just acting based on what they heard from others, and
likely planning to read the rules later.
Maybe amending the rule from "desire to become a player" to "desire to
be a player" would be an improvement. (This already starts with "An
unregistered person CAN", so it wouldn't pertain to people who are
already registered and desire to remain so.) But we may also want to
legislate a standard for an unregistered person attempting to perform an
action limited to players, maybe ruling it as triggering registration
unless for some reason they clearly didn't intend it to. (What if they
only make that clear later? Do we retroactively ignore eir registration,
or just advise em to deregister?)
The rules are explicit in requiring registration messages to only be
reasonably clear and reasonably unambiguous; to hold them to an
unreasonable standard of unambiguity is to ignore the plain language of
the rule (and a message is reasonably unambiguous if all
interpretations other than the obvious one are unreasonable, as they
are in this case).
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a registration message to
actually explicitly contain some synonym of "register". The history of
only-slightly-ambiguous message that inspired the lowered bar has been
more like "I want to be a player" or "I intend to join Agora".
I do think that's unreasonable – there is no requirement to do so in
the rules. You register by indicating your desire to become a player,
not by sending a message that looks like a registration message.
You register by indicating reasonably clearly/unambiguously your desire,
and what's disputed here is whether a message that doesn't look like a
registration message can still be reasonably clear/unambiguous. (It does
unambiguously need to be a public message, at least.)
For what it's worth, since my last message, I have thought of an
argument that the registration might have failed, but it isn't in the
judgement: to have a desire to become a player, a person must a) desire
to be a player upon receipt of the message and b) believe that e was
not a player prior to the message. To me, the message in question
clearly demonstrates a), but it may not have demonstrated b). (The
interesting legal point is whether specifying the From: address as a
person previously unknown to Agora is sufficient to indicate that e
does not believe e was previously a player; it is unreasonable to
expect someone to believe emself to be a player if e has never
interacted with Agora, but it isn't obvious to me whether that fact is
contained within the part of the message that the rule is looking at.)
I think it's probably unrelated; more relevant is how likely it is that
the person is acting based on hearsay, and thus may believe something
that e would be unlikely to believe after reading the relevant rules.
This also pertains to seemingly unambiguous registration messages
following an ambiguous one, such as:
a) "I register", but ambiguously too soon after voluntary
deregistration (say within 1 minute of the time limit)
b) Five minutes later, "I register", or "If I'm unregistered then I
register", or "I register (ineffective if I already am)"
but I think that obvious intent to (become a player unless you already
are one) is reasonably clear/unambiguous, as the only scenario where it
wouldn't apply is one where it wouldn't need to.
--
[ANSC H:GE V:G B:0]
