The following is a proto-judgement. Please let me know of any comments. I plan to issue the judgement later today or tomorrow absent feedback.
*** I announce judgement that CFJ 3662 is TRUE. Relevant Rules: > Rule 2139/14 (The Registrar) > The Registrar is an office; its holder is responsible for keeping track of > players. The Registrar's weekly report includes: > > 1. A list of all players, including information sufficient to identify and > contact each player. . . . > > Rule 2510/4 (Such is Karma) > . . . > A player CAN publish a Notice of Honour. For a Notice of Honour to be valid, > it must: > 1. Be clear that it is a Notice of Honour, and be the first valid Notice > of Honour that player has published in the current week; > 2. Specify any other player or Agora to gain karma, and provide a reason > for specifying that player; and > 3. Specify any player or Agora to lose karma, and provide a reason for > specifying that player. > 4. Not result in Agora's karma moving farther away from 0. > . . . Judge’s Evidence: > On Sun, Sep 23, 2018, 14:02 Reuben Staley <[email protected]> wrote: > I submit this notice of honor: > > -1 to D. Margaux for being a manipulator > +1 to D Margaux for helping debug zombie rules > > I call a CFJ: This Notice of Honour causes a player's karma to change by > exactly one and then change back. Caller’s Arguments: > In standard English, initials can be spelled with periods and > spaces between them, with only periods, with only spaces, or with nothing. > For example: > > J. R. R. Tolkien > J.R.R. Tolkien > J R R Tolkien > JRR Tolkien > > All four aforementioned names refer to the same person, John Ronald Reuel > Tolkien. Since all players are persons, it follows that initials should be > accepted using any method of separation. > > Therefore, "D. Margaux" and "D Margaux" refer to the same person, a person > who registered during April of this year. Judge’s Arguments: This CFJ raises two related questions. 1. Rule 2510 provides that a published Notice of Honour is EFFECTIVE inter alia only if it is “clear that [the published message is] a Notice of Honour.” Trigon evidently attempted to publish a Notice of Honour by stating, “I submit this notice of honor.” The first question is whether it is “clear” that this misspelled “notice of honor” is a “Notice of Honour.” “Honor” and “Honour” are alternate spellings of the same word. Any reasonable player would understand that Trigon’s message was publishing a Notice of Honour under Rule 2510. And it would cause great mischief, and opportunities for lame and annoying scams to the detriment of the game, if minor typographical errors or the use of alternative spellings could defeat the EFFECTIVEness of a message that is otherwise clearly and unmistakably an attempt to undertake a valid game action. Accordingly, I judge that the message is an attempt to issue a Notice of Honour, even though that was not spelled exactly as provided in the Rule. 2. Trigon’s Notice of Honour attempted to remove one karma from “D. Margaux” and add one karma to “D Margaux.” The question is whether those two names both refer to the same player (i.e., me, the judge in this case). There are no Rules that require Players to have only one single immutable “name.” Rule 2139 requires the Registrar to maintain “information sufficient to identify and contact each player,” but it does not require the Registrar to maintain a single official “name” for players. It would also cause great mischief and opportunities for annoying and lame scams if actions that clearly and unmistakably named a player were deemed ineffective because of a minor and insubstantial typo or spelling variation. Last month, I sent a registration message signed “--D. Margaux,” from an email account with an email name “D Margaux <[email protected]>.” Any reasonable player would perceive that both “D Margaux” and “D. Margaux” refer to the same entity (me). Various messages have referred to me using both variations without comment from any player or any indication of confusion or ambiguity. Accordingly, I judge that Trigon’s message named me as the player to both gain and lose one karma in eir Notice of Honour. I judge that the CFJ is TRUE. > On Sep 23, 2018, at 11:19 PM, Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > CFJ 1361 ("Beverly") is quite relevant here. > >> On Sun, 23 Sep 2018, Alex Smith wrote: >>> On Sun, 2018-09-23 at 14:02 -0600, Reuben Staley wrote: >>> Therefore, "D. Margaux" and "D Margaux" refer to the same person, a >>> person who registered during April of this year. >>> >>> This ends my arguments for a frivolous CFJ. I probably did something >>> wrong. >> >> Our precedent is basically that player names aren't a "tracked" thing, >> rather we simply identify players by whichever means is most >> convenient. (It should in theory be possible to change how someone else >> is named on the Registrar report if everyone persistently calls them by >> a particular name.) As such, any unambiguous attempt to name someone is >> likely to work, regardless of what the spelling is. >> >> (There was a period of Agoran history where we had a player named >> "Wooble" and a player named "woggle", and occasionally people got >> confused and ended up producing a name somewhere in between. I can't >> remember for certain how that worked out, but I'd expect it to be "as >> long as it's clear who's the poster was trying to name, it works". This >> situation is much less ambiguous.) >> >> -- >> ais523 >> >
