It was my intention to reopen the Rule 4 main discussion thread, but reading back over it, there is so much us-versus-them rhetoric that doing so would probably start the whole nonsense up again. Hence, this thread, which is about to become the main Rule 4 discussion thread.
When I say discussion, however, I’m not going to open it for discussion until I’ve dealt with some of the major points raised via TG, IRC and in various threads here. This will take more than one post – hell, in the IRC sessions alone I’ve got just under 7500 words to summarise -- so look for the bolded titles to find a particular topic. I'll try to keep my posts to A4 page length.
The essence of R4 is: a proposal is an official statement by an organisation called the World Assembly. The World Assembly is an international gathering which individual nations attend. The Security Council is a chamber of that assembly. To be consistent with that concept, its official statements should therefore sound like – be capable of being read as – dealing with nations.
Okay, now on to what that means in action.
REGIONAL OFFSITES An offsite forum has an electronic existence on a site that hosts forums. If someone hacks it, you have to go to the forum hosts for assistance. If you write a Getting Help Request to NS mods asking for action against a player who hacked your offsite, you will be told that there is nothing we can do. The action took place outside NS. Your offsite forum is not within reach of NS.
However, as Naivetry pointed out in this post, the offsite is a place where a community gathers. That community is made up of NSers whose nations are in a region. The hacking is not part of NS, but the devastation of the regional community is. If you express it in such terms – destruction of @@REGION@@’s community, shock and distress to the members of @@REGION@@ (which can be read in the sense “member nations”), loss of its history, invasion or destruction of, or attack on, its forums – you’ll be sweet with Rule 4.
But wait – forums? How is that a “nation” word? Well, "forums" is used in the phrase "the forums of power". You hear pompous RL pollies say "the forums of our nation" when they mean "parliament". The electronic entities, both on NS and on the offsites, are known as “forums” because they serve a function similar to the original Forum in Rome.
You may not mean it in the “forums of our nation” way, but it can be read that way. It’s consistent with the “nation” concept of NationStates.
