On Sun, 2026-05-10 at 02:50 -0400, Aris via agora-discussion wrote: > On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 2:42 AM Gregory Hayes via agora-discussion < > [email protected]> wrote: > > No, I do understand that, I just don't think there's any textual support > > for the claim that mechanism-less actions are necessarily impossible in the > > rules. If they're impossible, that's a matter of Rule 217 interpretation, > > which makes Rule 2125 potentially relevant. I was just saying that > > technically that interpretation doesn't involve PROHIBITING unregulated > > actions so much as preventing them, or interpreting them as not being > > possible to begin with. > > My sincere apologies for misunderstanding you then! > > You're right, it's not textually in the rules. I think it's a natural part > of the way reality works, but the fact that people keep trying such things > means that my interpretation may not be entirely common sense. But yeah, > precedent and game custom weigh strongly here.
The way I see it, regardless of whether or not mechanism-less actions are possible, there's no reason to expect that sending a message to Agora's public fora would succeed in accomplishing them – the rules are quite clear on what sorts of actions care specifically about the message being to a public forum, and if an action isn't one of those, there's no reason to (e.g.) expect there to be any difference in effectiveness between sending it to agora-business and agora- discussion, and hard to explain why sending it to an entirely unrelated mailing list might not have the same effect. In general, it's clear to me that "without a mechanism you can't perform the action" is preferable to the alternative, which would lead to actions happening continuously and unpredictably all the time and we would have no way of knowing which actions had actually occurred. There's also some amount of (vague) rules guidance in rules 2140 and 217, which together mostly imply that a rule takes no notice of things with lower power unless a common-sense interpretation of it implies that it should (although, unsurprisingly, there's a lot of grey area and those rules don't directly address the concept of actions being taken with no mechanism to do so). There is, however, fairly recent (i.e. only years rather than decades) strong game custom that an action with no mechanism can't be performed, even if the rules clearly envision it being possible (or outright state that it is possible), which is almost certainly enough to swing a rule 217 test in that direction. -- ais523
