On Thu, 23 Jan 2020 at 02:11, Aris Merchant via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > Why are we reading the date-stamping to refer to the date-stamp of the > original message? I would think it obvious that the relevant message is the > one to the public forum, not the original one which wasn’t to the public > forum. > > -Aris
I think this is tricky. I haven't thought about it too carefuly, but here's a possible argument for saying it should be the date stamp on the original message. Consider the following timeline. Feb 1: I sent a message to myself containing a by-announcement action. Call that message M0. Feb 3: I forward message M0 to the public forum, in a new message M1. Feb 4: A CFJ is called about when I did the by-announcement action. Let's consider what Rule 478 has to say on Feb 4. "Any action performed by sending a message is performed at the time date-stamped on that message." Did I perform the action by sending M0 or by sending M1? R478 says 'To ... "announce" something is to send a public message whose body contains that thing.' Did I sent a public message when I sent M0? There's an obvious argument that I didn't: it was M1 that made M0 public, so surely I didn't "send a public message" by sending M0. But taking this logic further puts us in a strange place. I have heard there is precedent that a message that was not delivered to a significant number of players is not public. Since it takes some time between when a player sends a message and when it is delivered, it seems to me that we can't know whether the message was public until a (usually short) time after the message is sent. So, that would seem to say nobody ever sends public messages. So, I present a different way to think of it: because I sent M1, M0 is a public message, and was a public message to begin with. It was "sent via a public forum", even if the "via a public forum" part didn't become clear until Feb 3. So, I performed the action by sending M0, so the date stamp on M0 is the relevant one. - Falsifian
