My case for amendment of rules 2 and 3

[implosion]

I have two immediate reactions (just speaking for myself) - one, this is a really, really good example of why we take the "no discussing ongoing games" rule so very, very seriously. It's really possible for something as seemingly innocent as these SGB posts to influence a game, and I'd really recommend a mindset where if you're in a game, if you say anything even remotely pertaining to the game (like a comment on a user who was banned for actions in that game), try to cultivate an automatic internal response of "is there any even remotely theoretical way this could affect the game", and if the answer is yes, don't post it. Sure, there's some limit here (e.g. it's fine to make completely unrelated posts across the site even though that could affect the game by telling players that you're being active elsewhere) but in this case I think I would personally try to avoid it, innocuous though it seems. I do want to emphasize it doesn't actually matter that bugspray was right or wrong, what matters is that they saw posting somewhere on site by players in their game, that was related in some way to that game, and were able to try to draw some kind of connection.

Two, I just want to make sure I'm getting the reasons you're citing these rules right, bugspray. I believe you're saying rule 2 means you can't say "Ythan and Datisi made these posts in this other thread and that could be alignment-indicative", and that you're saying rule 3 means you can't tell the town "this player might get replaced because I think they're going to be banned, so we should wait for that"? If so, I don't think these cases necessarily mean "these rules need to be modified". These are cases where we sort of have to pick between two evils. For the rule 2 case, the *ideal* solution is that people all act perfectly and never post anything even remotely game-related outside of the game thread. And usually, I think, that is the case, and this is why I had the entire first paragraph, because I think that is at least partially the moral here. But if it does happen then we have to pick between the evil of "this external thing might affect this game's integrity" (especially in a case like this, where the offending posts were in the speakeasy, which not all players may have access to) and the evil of "we can't talk about this thing that my reads might be affected by". A valid option, I believe, is (if you really do think this has an impact on your reads) to say e.g. "i also have other reasons to scumread Datisi, but can't discuss them". In the rule 3 case, we have to choose between the evil of "people might discuss replacements in a way that hurts game integrity" and "people might be unable to discuss replacements in a way that hurts game integrity".

I'm not really sure if there's a good rule that can act perfectly in all these situations, and I tend to think the situations that these rules were designed for that they do adequately address are more common than situations like these. That's not to say these rules are perfect, nor that they can't be improved, I just don't really see how to do so in a way that addresses these, at least at a glance.

[implosion]

I don’t think a single reaction post to a ban is ever going to indicate someone’s alignment in game to an accuracy of better than luck

I don't think it's that hard to imagine a situation where this could be the case, even if you think Datisi's post isn't that. Say player x and player y are in a game together, and player y gets banned for cheating in another game. Player x comments in sgb "whoa, didn't see that coming". This could have implications on how much player x and player y have interacted, which could have implications on whether they're scum together. Say they comment "Sad," and that player y had been playing very well in their game together; this could have implications e.g. that player x is sad that a person who was playing well is going to have to be replaced. Etc, etc. Sure there's not a perfect concrete link necessarily but it's definitely possible to read info into something like that, no matter how innocuous the post is. Things get more clear-cut as having information if we make the post slightly less innocuous, like "huh, hadn't really directly interacted with player y but didn't see that coming", a reaction that sort of clearly would imply that they're less likely to be scum together but on its face is still just a single reaction post.

But I think more important is the principle of the matter; strictly speaking, it could have alignment info, which means it's possible for a player to see it and come to a conclusion based on it. In a sort of pure information-theoretic way, its relevance is nonzero. The line is just hard to draw.