On 12/28/2019 2:34 PM, AIS523--- via agora-discussion wrote:
On Sat, 2019-12-28 at 14:11 -0800, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion
wrote:
I seem to recall hearing once about an incident where a person
attempted to register as a player twice concurrently under different
names. Does anyone know where that precedent can be found? It's
relevant to a thesis that I'm thinking of writing.
The relevant search term is "Annabel crisis".
Apparently there's been more than one such incident, but Annabel was
the most famous.
A person claiming to be "Annabel" (purportedly) registered and deregistered
twice via the usual methods. Once from 29-Jul-99 to 1-Oct-99, and once from
16-May-01 to 31-May-01.
Then, on 30-Jan-03, the player known as Maud/harvel (whom the record showed
was registered from 20-Apr-99 to 13-Dec-06, so during both periods of
Annabel's registration) confessed that e had been Annabel the whole time:
https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-business/2003-January/000673.html
Maud's message is clear and worth reading, and lays out the issues. While
there is a spirited thread in DIS (also worth reading), scrolling through
CFJs of the time shows no CFJ on the matter. Maud's analysis that while
claiming to deregister as "Annabel", e had deregistered emself, was
generally accepted, and we went straight to via-proposal ratification.
Why no CFJ?
I can't quite remember, but this was before self-ratification.
Unfortunately, when one of "Annabel's" deregistration messages had been
sent, Maud was an officer. And under the rules at the time, we didn't self-
ratify "documents that purported" to be things like vote resolutions - the
rules basically said "the Promotor CAN resolve votes" but if that person
turned out later to not be the promotor, then that vote was was never
resolved. And this was 4 years later.
This meant A LOT of actions had failed and there was a lot of game state
uncertainty - including in officers. There was no way to know who had the
ability to assign a CFJ or do anything, really. This is why it was
considered a "Crisis" and not simply a fix. We decided to just go with the
proposal fix (that ratified Annabel as a separate entity from Maud, that
sent all of Annabel's purported messages) to converge the game without
worrying about what the "CFJ-found" true state of the game was.
TO get the proposal distributed, *everyone* made an announcement that they
resigned the office of Promotor, so we knew with relative certainty that the
office was vacant, and one person could take over that role going forward,
so we knew that the fix proposal was actually distributed and so forth.
Also, it took a long time to get the proposal written right - looking at
the archives I spotted two proposals (by Murphy) trying to fix things in
March - May that were voted down, before Murphy's Proposal 4504 fixed
stuff in June (I'm indebted to Murphy's Agoran Weekly Journal archives for
making this easy to find):
https://mailman.agoranomic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/agora-official/2003-June/000664.html
After this Crisis, Maud was really active in a substantial rules re-write in
2003-2006 (including creating Switches, Decisions and, I think, doing a lot
towards creating self-ratification so this kind of thing would be easier to
fix).
So I think e made up for it.
