spoon-discuss: Re: spoon-business: RFJ

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth "Chess":
> I hearby make a Request For Judgement.
> 
> Statement:
> 
> Voting without notifying the Administrator of your votes is possible [[if
> not entirely practical]]
> 
> Analysis:
> 
> There is nothing in the rules that I can find which states how one should
> vote. Therefore, it is entirely possible to vote by any means one wishes,
> and one is fully justified in complaining about the actions that ought due
> to other rules to result from their votes not being carried out even if one
> has not actually posted one's votes in a way seen by the Administrator. This
> system may be open to abuse, as such private votes may be said by the player
> to be anything they like. [[I intend to write up a proposal to fix this when
> I get time, but a RFJ seemed more fun right now.]]
> 
> [[Right, given I've been a bit rushed in writing this, I suspect (hope?)
> it's going to be refuted pretty easily...]]

R112 prohibits actions in private fora, unless allowed by the Rules. R226 
allows a specific kind of action to take place in private fora, namely 
voting by notifying the Admin. I suppose you could take "A Player may vote 
privately if e so desires by notifying the Administrator" to mean that a 
Player could email me saying "Hey! I'm voting privately!" and then not send 
me eir votes, but I see two possible responses to that:

1) "Fora are the means by which Players communicate." according to R112. 
Voting privately by sending your votes to yourself may not constitute 
communication between Players. If that's the case, however, that may mean 
that none of my votes have ever counted, unless of course there is some 
caveat that allows me to communicate with myself so long as it is in two 
different capacaties, namely as the Admin and as a Player. Weird.

2) The second, and I believe more plausible, response comes from the last 
sentence of R226: "Votes cast privately shall not be revealed until voting 
ends." So, even if someone were to cast votes in the "private" manner 
described above, an argument could be made that they are required to reveal 
their votes when voting ends.

On the other hand, these two rely on what I believe is a spurious 
interpretation of "notify". I think there is an implied "of eir votes" at 
the end of "A Player may vote privately if e so desires by notifying the 
Administrator."

My $0.02.

-- 
J.