IC: The appropriate World Assembly office receives a secure electronic message. It reads:
"The Union of Virtual States votes against this repeal. While we are glad to see that World Assembly legislation is being dutifully examined for potential problems, we do not consider the problems raised by this repeal to have a significant chance of occurring in times of peace or of war.
World Assembly Liaison Office, Department of Foreign Relations, National Government of the Union of Virtual States"
OOC: I think there's an important question about mass telegrams that hasn't been asked yet. Can you exclude certain regions from receiving a mass telegram when you write it? If so, regions asking people not to send their members mass telegrams is more defensible, because complying with that request doesn't mean you can't send mass telegrams. Even having consequences for noncompliance like the ROVA does is more defensible, because people who send them anyway can safely be assumed to either not have read the request or just didn't care. If that can't be done, though, then I think asking people not to send mass telegrams is an overreach. In order to comply, a player can't send any mass telegrams at all, which locks them out of a feature of the site that the developers intended for them to have access to, and no region really has the right to do that to nations outside of that region. If noncompliance is met with negative action by the region, that's discouraging people from using the feature, and if the negative action matters to enough people, I think that's probably going to cause a chilling effect where fewer people use the feature. Of course, if the negative action doesn't matter, there's much less to worry about, but then people will send mass telegrams anyway.
This isn't to say I think the ROVA was written to be an unfair exercise of power over nations outside of Ten Thousand Islands, after all, as I said in character above, I like to assume good faith. It's fair to not want useless messages cluttering your inbox. But I do think it's unnecessary, given that people can indeed opt out of WA campaign telegrams on their own. If I'm right about it having a chilling effect, then it's even worse because that effect isn't even for the sake of a necessary approach. I think a better approach would be for Ten Thousand Islands and any other regions that request that their members not be sent mass telegrams to remind their members that they can opt out of those telegrams and maybe write a short guide on how to do it. Their members' inboxes are less cluttered, and people can still send mass telegrams, so everybody wins.
Also, is there a list of "canonical" World Assembly departments/offices/etc somewhere I can look over? I'd like to be more specific than "the appropriate World Assembly office" when I'm writing in character.
